Just who is this standardized American anyway? He is, it would seem, an even more elusive personality than this Christian Gauss. For just what are his standards, and wherein lies the vice of standardization so long as the standards partake to some extent of the nature of truth?

The Harvard CRIMSON rushed editorially to the defense of Mr. George F. Babbitt recently, working on the basis that attack is the best defense. For Mr. Babbitt's detractors, the CRIMSON points out, are most uniform indeed in their criticism and in their theories of aesthetics. "Is not the craze of standardization revealed in this very attitude? These intelligentsia have their own conception of what constitutes culture, and they are dissatisfied because all Americans are not standardized on that particular pattern."

Far be it from the Princetonian to set itself up as dramatic arbiter whose opinion is the sine qua non of theatrical criticism, but a four-to-one preference one way or another is certainly the essence of standardization. And when an aethetic concensus is in favor of the inartistic--or let us say, the hackneyed--deus ex machina as opposed to the more logical and, therefore from a dramatic standopint, the more artistic unhappy ending--it is time to do something beyond complimenting ourselves.

The CRIMSON has missed the point. The true intelligentsia do not insist on their own particular point of view--that is obviously not the cultured outlook. It is not that any single theory is more correct than any other, but that a four out-of-five agreement on some subject reflects a singularly narrowed, amazingly uncritical, and therefore more or less uncultured, outlock. For just as uniformity predicts narrowness so is breadth inherent in culture. --The Daily Princetonian.