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The dining-hall (refectory) of Hart House. The shields of all the leading universities of Europe and America are emblazoned

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Hart House Theatre. The staging, properties, lighting, management, and acting are all under the charge of undergraduates

as the perennial Balkans. Socially, lacking any integrating influence, it must be a widely differentiated community. Administratively all of the constituent elements are joined together under the Presidency of Sir Robert Falconer, K.C.M.G. Hart House provides the missing social link or, to be more exact in definition of a unique institution, the group of links holding together in daily opportunities for communal activities or shared hours of ease the students of sectarian or professional schools otherwise only neighboring in geography. The "prayer" of the Founders is that Hart House "may serve the highest interests of this University" by "drawing into a common fellowship and"-much more original in idea and significant in purpose -"by gathering into a true society" the members of the several "faculties" and colleges: teacher and student, graduate and undergraduate.

Accordingly, this place must be distinguished from the Michigan Union, which is the largest and in many ways the most thriving of university unions in the United States. The building at Ann Arbor is by contrast, with its sixty bedrooms, its restaurant and cafeteria, its dominating cigar and news stand, more of a huge hotel, conforming to hotel standards, but given a personal and humanizing touch for university use. Hart House is less of a hotel meeting-place and more of a center because many more University, municipal, and provincial activities converge and transpire there. Some of the links forged by the Massey Foundation bind the University more

effectively to the life of a city of 600,000, which is Toronto, and bring it more directly under the solicitude of the province and the Dominion. Governor Simcoe's motto on his coat of arms in the rotunda of the Administration Building (Simcoe Hall)-"Non Sibi sed Patria"means something definite. Hart House turns the sentiment into successful practice.

Exclusive of the affiliated colleges and extension courses, 5,044 students were enrolled at Toronto last year as resident candidates for degrees. This, outside the quantity-production zone of "higher" education, is a big university-twice the enrollment size of Princeton or Dartmouth College, larger than Yale, and about the same size as Indiana. Every male undergraduate of the University is, ipso facto, a member of Hart House, towards the upkeep of which he pays a moderate assessment or fee. Hart House sets out to give directly to all men undergraduates, and less directly to men graduates, the tangible and intangible ingredients of university life that are found traditionally at Oxford and Cambridge. It provides everything in the normal social life of a university but sleep and teaching, though eight comfortable visitors' rooms are set apart for distinguished guests of the University, and the warden, as the general manager is called, has his apartment on the premises. In such a centripetal neighborhood of separate interests how, for example, is an engineering student to meet a theologian, an arts undergraduate to know a law student, a student of medicine or music

to find common ground with a foresterall of them in that "true society" which the founders postulate?

Hart House is the answer; and it is not a forced or an artificial answer. It must therefore be a desirable place, a house where men go more than willingly, eagerly. It is constituted a meetingplace; it makes itself a living place. There must, then, be material comforts and livable, alluring surroundings; but the place must not be merely a glorified combination of bowling alleys, barbershops, lounge parlors, soda fountains, and hospitalized eating mills. The founders, after an extended survey of all corresponding institutions abroad and in American university centers, have put a lot of thought and care basically into their comforts, their amusements, their eating. Hart House is unalterably opposed, in theory and practice, to the cafeteria idea. It insists on regarding meal time as one of the ordained and most natural of the amenities of life. Just as the French army during four years did its bit towards winning the war by religiously keeping the war out of their meals, so Hart House proves that a student's day's work and play may far more completely be realized by observing intervals for the decent associations of eating. In the Great Hall of Hart House three hundred men dine together every night. They do not back into a filling station for nourishment. Hart House believes that the difference, multiplied by days and months and years, is directly computable in character and personality. Everybody in the Univer

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sity community can afford to meet here and take time decently to eat here. Breakfasts at 15 cents, luncheon at 25, and dinner at 35 cents underbid cafeterias; the meals are well served, with clean silver and linen; the cathedral-like interior begets an unoppressed sense of good manners and consideration for others, some peace descends, a feeling of helpful intermission punctuates the day. And yet at the University of Chicago an equally beautiful and reverential interior becomes daily the arena where men and women scramble over one another with clattering trays in competitive displays of fuel absorption against time.

This is just one thing, and a little thing if you like, but it is a manifestation of the spirit of Hart House. The key struck in the Great Hall pervades doings in the rest of the building. The gray stone structure is a university club not in a careless or loose sense. To put it in a different way, it is the club of the young gentlemen of the University of Toronto, much more than a convenience, therefore; something begetting a sense of responsibility and propriety of the kinds that are felt and recognized rather than enforced.

The library is for every man to feel his own and use as one in his father's house. It is a small library of fewer than 4,000 volumes picked for their actual readability, not in conformity with mechanical lists; no librarian exists;

there are no blanks to fill out, no signs,
no restrictions of any kind except the
understood provision that books may not
be removed from the premises without
especial considerations. Every Friday
night of the academic year there is good
music in the music-room. The doors are
open, come and go as and if you like.
No ghastly ranks of gilded-chair discom-
fort and self-consciousness. Debating, as
a practical training for public careers and
Dominion affairs, is taken very seriously,
but not, as in the States' universities, with
three picked men on a side. In the Hart
House forums, as in the Oxford Union,
anybody in the room-Faculty, students,
or visitors is a potential debater. The
sketch-room is a gallery studio where
exhibitions are given consecutively
through the year, with changes every two
weeks, lectures and informal discussions
held, and periodical instruction provided
for sketch classes. The windows in the
chapel are colored by glass from the war-
ruined chapels in France; Christians of
any denomination or sect are welcome to
meet or worship there.

A peculiarity that most visitors notice
in the architectural plan of the building
is indicative of its purpose. Hart House
has no main entrance, no primary access
commensurate with the size or belonging
to the whole of the structure. The near-
est thing to it is the archway leading into
the quadrangle from which many doors,
besides others in the outer façade, of

equal importance open into the varied quarters combined within the building. On the left you enter the gymnasium wing, with its locker space for three thousand members; the dining-hall is entered straight in front; on the right doors open into the S. C. A. and the Students' Common Rooms. Beneath the grass in the center is Hart House Theatre, the solidest, best equipped and organized, the most ambitious arrival in the dramatic impulse that is stirring from one end of Canada to the other. In the Dominion drama it occupies a similar place to that of the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, or the Neighborhood Players in the States. In the beginning a student enterprise, it has become in recent years a community theater for the city of Toronto and the Province of Ontario as well. It is entirely self-containedmakes its own scenery, costumes, lighting effects, theatrical devices--and it is entirely self-supporting.

In all its various manifestations Hart House lives and works year after year at the center of the varied life of the University, the city, and the province. Insensibly, through the years, as young life flows through its beautiful and becoming heart, may not those youthful currents be enriched in lasting ways to neutralize the appalling cheapness of commercially standardized living spreading like a pall over the America of the United States and Canada?

W

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

Another Hymn of Hate

HEN Ernst Lissauer wrote his famous "Hymn of Hate Against England," the nation which took it best-naturedly was England. Beginning with "Punch's" picture of a German family having its morning hate, the phrase passed into a stock expression in the British army. Captured Germans were amazed when Tommies gathered about them and insisted on hearing them sing the great hate song. Persons in that furious frame of mind are invariably amusing, although they are sometimes pitiful.

It is no new thing to write a book endeavoring to indict a whole nation or people. A score of years ago an Englishman tried it in "The Unspeakable Scot," and the Scot replied with "The Egregious English." If the humor hadn't faded, 'possibly some one might have treated the

whole, it constitutes one of those halftruths which Lord Tennyson described. effectively. The author confined herself world to "The Irredeemable Irish" and chiefly to the exploits of California crim

"The Wearisome Welsh." Now, at any
rate, two writers, named Veronica and
Paul King, have written "The Raven on
the Skyscraper." If the authors were
not possessed of a sense of humor suffi-
ciently keen to appreciate anything ridic-
ulous (when it is done by a Yankee),
they might have added the sub-title "The
Absolutely Abominable Americans," for
they try to convince themselves that the
North American continent, excepting, of
course, the Dominion of Canada, is a
sink of corruption.

The authors, individually or together,
have written nine or ten other books, one
of which, "Problems of Modern Ameri-
can Crimes," I have read. Taken as a

The Raven on the Skyscraper: A Study of Modern American Portents. By Veronica and Paul King. T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., London. 10s. 6d.

inals, and, in fact, one would gather from that book and the present one that Mr. and Mrs. (Miss?) King's experiences in this country had chiefly been within a few miles of Hollywood. In the book on American crime this country is attacked at its weakest and most shameful point. Not content with the dark hues of truth, however, the author blackens us still more, until she manages to present the spectacle of a people threequarters of whom are criminals and the other fraction idiots. It should have been a very gratifying book to that class of European newspaper which directs its American correspondents to send no news except about lynchings, murders, robberies, minor scandals, and exhibitions of

2 See, by the way, Mr. Stoddard King's rhymes quoted in last week's Book Table.

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silliness. There are readers in all European countries, and, unfortunately, there are a few in Great Britain, who wish to hear only this kind of news about America. For this class the author of "Problems of Modern American Crime" is the writer par excellence.

"The Raven on the Skyscraper," a general denunciation of all things American, is dedicated to "The Dying Race of Real Americans with Sympathy and Admiration." It is possible to find in it, by strict search, an occasional word of mild praise for something which has happened in Yankeeland. But it is merely to enable the writers to gather strength for a more vigorous attack on the next page, somewhat as the "Saturday Review" of thirty years ago, if it were betrayed into a few stammering words of commendation for anything French, American, or Russian, used to turn in the next paragraph with renewed savagery upon one or the other of its pet objects. of hatred. One need not take Mr. and Mrs. King's admiration for "The Dying Race of Real Americans" very seriously. I would like to pay them the compliment of thinking that they are good stout old Tories of the die-hard variety, like Sir William Hardman, whose second volume of memoirs has just been published. Sir William wrote during our Civil War, and he rubs his hands with glee at the thought of the enormous debt which the North was accumulating. I fear, however, that the authors of "The Raven on the Skyscraper" have neither Sir William's stamina nor his right of hatred by inheritance, so to speak. There is a disagreeable suggestion throughout the book that much of their animosity is pumped up to please a small market in England and Europe. There are certainly readers in all the countries across the Atlantic, harassed by taxes and annoyed by the tales of American wealth, who can get a certain joy if any one will only whack Uncle Sam hard enough. Moreover, I doubt very much if any judicious and fair-minded Englishman will read this book without being convinced that it came from a deep-seated personal animus; that its authors suffered some slight or disappointment in this country, and are now engaged in getting even. Their intimacy with Hollywood is suspicious. Many a lecturer, author, or dramatist goes away from America, roundly cursing the country which has not accepted him at his own estimate. Nobody paints a country as jet black unless he feels himself suffering under a personal injury.

The authors discuss Ellis Island and the conditions of immigration; they describe our yellow and silly press and some of the eccentricities of our new religious

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