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Editorial

When Emerson had read the first publication of Leaves of Grass,
he wrote to Walt Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great
career." Reincarnations of Whitman are, of course, very scarce in the
world, but there still remains an analogy between Leaves of Grass and
the launching of any new and honest literary effort. Those of us who
have witnessed the founding of Contrast have admired the imagina-
tion and practical resourcefulness that have brought this new magazine
out of mere potentiality into healthy young existence.

The magazine originated spontaneously among a group of inter-
ested students. With much careful planning and hard work they
organized a staff, set up an office,performed innumerable chores, and
finally assembled the material for this first issue and prepared it for the
press. Since no magazine can live without readers, the staff has been
mightily encouraged by the cordial response of subscribers. In fact,
the whole project reflects a fine school spirit as well as intellectual vi-
tality. Contrast has, judging by these portents, good reason to feel

welcome and at home on the campus.
These beginnings are promising; significant too, for a literary

periodical is something a little different from just another extracur-
ricular activity. It is, in the true sense, an educational enterprise.
Imaginative writing can be fun, to be sure. But when well done, such
work is also an art; and art is an exacting, as well as an alluring, task-
master. Writing a good story provides more than merely an outlet for
creative energy, valuable as that may be, for he who would render the
world around him realizable to other minds (or to his own) must
learn a sharpened awareness of the actual, unlabelled qualities of
things, to which we may normally be indifferent, or blind through
familiarity. Nor does a writer bring characters convincingly to life
without catching the subtle manifestations which truly reveal them, or
without a searching scrutiny of human motive. Language art is, among

other things, an empirical study of life.

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