Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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IX € OLA COLLEGE REVIEW rrr O38C Ol We take this opportunity of welcoming back to Loyola two former students, Dr. Neil Feeney and Mr. Paul Casey. Dr. Feeney graduated here with honours in 1922, did brilliantly in medicine at McGill, and then went to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston, for research. Dur- ing the past year he has been lecturing in biology at Loyola. Mr. Casey graduated with the Class of '24, was constantly outstanding among the law students of his year at McGill, and after passing his bar examination spent some time at post- graduate work in Europe. At present a member of the firm, Atwater, Beauregard, and Phillimore, he lectures here on Fundamental Law. Alumni Professors The article on the Alumni, formerly a regular feature of the Review, has been finally superseded by an independent and mote satisfactory publication, The Loyola The Loyola Alumnus. This 1s the official organ of the Loyola Alumni Association Ренеа and meets an obvious need in a manner more direct and efficient than is possible in the Review. Not only was it becoming more difficult, year by year, for us to avoid sins of omission, but the increasing numbers of the Alumni were rendering a yearly article of some four or five pages more and more inadequate. An entirely different form of treatment was, therefore, desiderated; and when the L'27 widened its horizon to become The Loyolan, a further change was soon effected making it The Loyola Alumnus. To the editor, Mr. D. Frank Macdonald, to the chairman of the publication committee, Mr. Kenneth McArdle, as well as to the anonymous committee itself, great credit is due. The neat format, exact typography, and ar gare d the succinct тийш of a great deal of matter are qualities noticed by all who saw the issue. ith our modest acquaintance with the work of publication, we cannot but reflect that the art of finding time and the virtue of giving it, both inevitably learned by students who get out the Review in the hours between class and study, were exten- sively bunc in preparing the Alumnus for the press. We venture to repeat an appeal made by the editor. The constant changes of address, so common in our mobile age and on our unsettled continent, make even accuracy in the Directory difficult, and completeness well-nigh impossible. The only solution is for each one ever connected with Loyola to write to the Secretary of the Loyola Alumni Association, Loyola College, Montreal, and give what information he can about former students. The individual effort required is not oppressive, the advantage derived remarkably great; every answer to the request promises more answers, and so on in geometrical progression. A few pleasant words in the Alumnus about the future of the College remind us of the possible future of the Alumnus itself. It is not up to us to speculate upon even- tual lines of development and expansion, but at least we may say that it is not without precedent for an Alumni publication to become a fine magazine or a pro- minent periodical. To judge from beginnings, utility and interest dominate in the editor's policy. This alone is an initial guarantee of progress, and with the co- operation and widening interest that are due to come, the wish at the end of Father Rector's message, Vivat! Floreat! Crescat! may be turned into a prediction. Tr

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW Gilbert Keith Chesterton N a famous preface to a definitely poor play, Vic- tor Hugo outlined his conception of a new drama that was to be as large as life. The old ) classical distinction be- tween tragedy and com- edy was to be effaced; the sublime and the ridiculous were to be set side by side, and their juxtaposition was to result in a species of compressed reality, if not beauty, which was termed the grotesque. He had caught an idea from Chateaubriand, and prominent in the array of arguments for his theory was the contention that a catholic unity in difference, a manifold complexity, should mark the native art of Christian civilisation. In the execution of this lan Hugo never rose above fine melo- bon One reason of his failure was that he thought to produce Christian art without being a Christian. Now Mr. Chesterton is not a dramatist; but without reducing him to a formula, or making the ‘‘grotesque’’ the source of his inspiration or the key to his mind, it is possible to use this conception to indicate many dominant fcatures and important aspects. Happily, if only analogically, it characterizes his wis- dom, his thought, his imagination and his style. He advocates standing on one's head to see things properly, and this not by way of a casua we but on so many occasions and in such varied forms, that topsyturvydom might be exalted into a metaphorical definition of his philosophy of life. ‘Moor Eeffoc’’ (read it backwards) is to him “the masterpiece of the good realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. To a confusion of fantasy and fact, he adds a confusion of wisdom and folly. ‘‘Simply by going on being absurd a thing can become god-like; there is but one step from the ridicu- lous to the sublime.” Such imaginative flights into the theories of knowledge and conduct might lead anywhere; but here imagination is but the dress of an understanding that seems akin to in- tuitive vision. When Mr. Chesterton urges that the way to be great is to be a great fool, he is reminiscent of St. Paul. When to find the true value of things he would turn them upside down, he re- calls Aristotle's doctrine of the mean and the advice that comes asa corollary: to avoid the extremes one had best journey in the opposite direction to the rest of men. It is to criticism that he confines his original mind. Despite a full recog- nition of the unequivocal pronounce- ments of С. K.'s Weekly, distributism is not the outburst of a theorist with a vision of Utopia; it proceeds from a desire to emphasize directly and per- sistently an aspect of human nature that both capitalism and communism overlook. It is doing on a large scale what he does incidentally when he flourishes his brief for beer, pillories the millionaire who elaborately leads the simple life, ridicules the fatuous lady who indulges some charlatan by experimenting on the proletariat. It is not that his criticism is negative. A negative attitude would be agony to him; it is the invention of a ee age and runs counter to the straight- forward simplicity of his mind. He exposes fallacy and inconsistency with exultation because he loves mental т}