To those righteous people who would rise to punish the Germans, I think the foregoing should be an apposite example. Granted that the Germans are criminal offenders against the underlying laws of nations, how are we going to treat them? By getting angry and punishing them, seems to be the verdict of a good many. Even if the United States could defeat and punish the Germans severely, they would not be convinced of their wrongdoing, any more than the criminal was. Their only desire, as was his, would be to bide their time for another outbreak, their only fault the error of being caught. They might feel as a nation what the old time criminal felt as a man, that the whole world was against them.

As with the criminal we look into his environment to explain his crimes and to remedy his ailments, as we have come to call them, so we must look to the German environment if we are to reform Germany. And the reformer must praise judiciously as well as blame. We as a neutral nation could have been a possible reformer of Germany; but we have almost lost that power by the general condemnation of all Germany's acts and the praise or at least condonation of all of the deeds of the Allies.

Saranac Lake, N. Y.

EVA A. FRANK.

Concerning Schönberg's Music

SIR:

IR: I have an aunt who has a passion for the music of Arnold Schönberg. She took me to hear the quartet, the sextet, the chamber symphony, the tone-poem "Pelleas und Melisanda." At the close of each performance she cried ecstatically, "It's like hearing a new 'Tristan.' She plays the second of the "Three Pieces for Piano" because "it sounds just like Chopin in spots," and her desire for the close of the war is largely inspired by a wish to go to Germany and hear the "Gurrelieder."

My aunt is not a professional critic, and yet I think her It's like hearing a new 'Tristan'" sounder criticism of Schönberg than your interesting article of December 25th.

Your article made, if I remember aright, a plea for fairminded consideration of the works in Schönberg's later style, on the ground that since the man had so long written music that was like Wagner and Strauss, his new music, which seems frankly ugly, must be an absolutely sincere product. And I suppose you mean by artistic sincerity the production on the part of the artist only of works that he himself feels to be beautiful and in which he expresses his sense of beauty; and by artistic insincerity the usurpation by technique of that portion of the work that should proceed from the emotions.

Certainly one cannot accuse Schönberg of insincerity in his earlier works. They are so sincere that they have demonstrated to the world once for all how much of a romanticist-an 1860 German romanticist-the composer is. There is no question of plagiarism. But there is a question. of originality, for that lies not in the technical means of which he makes use to express himself, but in what he has to express. If it were a matter of complicated harmonies and polyphonic voice-leading, Schönberg would be the most original of all living composers, for in erudition, in technical resources, he has no equal. The trouble is that his inspiration is not very fresh. In fact it is rather Wagnerian. Again and again while listening to the man's compositions I have the sensation that beneath all this technical splendor there pulsate the emotions of a sort of musical Swinburne, comprehensible enough as a product of a Victorian time, but ridiculous when taken as an expression of

our own day. That is what my aunt meant when she cried, "A new Tristan '!"

She likes Schönberg for being a romanticist of the good old sort. For the same reason I find him disappointing. Not that I dislike the romanticists. They express their age's revolt against prudery, just as Bach expressed in his music the Protestantism of the eighteenth century, and Beethoven in his the ideas of the French Revolution, the return to nature"; and the expression they gave to their age was what made them great. It seems to me that what makes them modern even to-day was that they realized for all eternity the feelings of their age. Schönberg's music was old when it was written, for the day during which it was being written is not in it. This day is in the fine naturalism of Maurice Ravel, in the great democratic art of Stravinsky, so deeply rooted in the spirit of his own Russian people. It is in the music of Leo Ornstein, that voice of the densely crowded cities, of the factories and mines. But in the music of Arnold Schönberg there is only a belated romanticism. And then, suddenly, he develops a new style, and becomes "modern."

It may be that all the rest was only apprenticeship, and that here he is himself. Certainly, the "new 'Tristan' cannot be found in the two sets of piano pieces, the orchestra pieces, the melodrama "Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire." Before finding himself every genius traverses a period during which he speaks with the tongues of his masters. When finally he finds himself, he says his own thoughts with his own voice. Wagner was already himself in the Flying Dutchman," Brahms in the Sonata Op. 5. But Schönberg's development had been mainly in the realm of technique. His preoccupation with form has always been evident. There is a great deal of Doctor of Music about the man, and of late his theories have interested him more than have his emotions. And just during this period of experimentation with musical theory there comes this "modern style. There is something so labored, so dead about the works in this new manner that one catches oneself won

dering whether these little pieces aren't entirely head-music, technical studies, experiments pure and simple, far removed from the finished product every work of art is. If they are such, we can at once cease to worry ourselves over a composer who believes that beauty can be mechanically created. P. L. ROSEnfeld.

S

New York City.

As to a German Revolution

IR: Mr. Frank Jewett Mather thinks that satisfactory terms of peace cannot be contemplated until Germany shows some signs of conversion. A revolution would constitute such a sign since it would mean a repudiation of the ruling classes. But is a continuation of the war the only way to bring about such a revolution? It should obviously be intelligent-not the mere blind uprising of a people who have suffered beyond endurance and are distracted by poverty and want. Before that stage is reached a strong condemnation of the ends and aims of the war might be made not only in Germany but in other countries by an outraged people if the terms of peace were clearly stated. If the great majority of German people knew just what they were sending their sons to die for, the repudiation of their rulers might be hastened. At any rate it could do nothing but good if the participants were to throw a little more light on their gigantic "moral" conflict.

Amherst, Mass.

HARRIET FOX WHICHER.

Tw

After the Play

WO programs in New York to-day make a special promise to the adventuring playgoer. One, Emanuel Reicher's, is an experiment in transplantation. The other, the Washington Square Players', is an experiment in incubation. Both are more or less insurgent from Broadway. In Mr. Reicher's case the public is asked to leave the beaten track to see a foreigner and a foreigner's scratch company in a play of great reputation. In the case of the Washington Square Players it is not the reputation of the dramas or the actors, but their freshness and audacity, that is expected to conquer the lethargic. Each of the experiments partly allures and partly intimidates the man who wants to see "a good play."

How Mr. Reicher fulfils his promise with "The Weav" has already been recorded in these columns. It is a vivid experience to see this Hauptmann play, to be taken with such a large dramatic sweep into the fortunes of oppressed workers, the children of a deep, humorous, sympathetic, inclusive heart. These are not the socially afflicted people of a journalistic mind, a mind concentrated on the theatrical punch and wallop. They are human beings more real to some of us than the ill-reported strikers of Houghton and Lawrence, and if the story is humanitarian it is also candid, escaping mawkishness and reformer's cant. Except for those who want obvious excitement or obvious entertainment, "The Weavers " is a richly satisfactory projection of a communal fate. To miss it is to let slip one of the few unqualified advantages of being in New York.

In the program of the Washington Square Players no such boon as "The Weavers" is conferred. To look for such an accomplishment, however, would be mistaken. The aim of the Players is at once humbler and more ambitious. It is to give scope in the Bandbox Theatre to an originality that would otherwise have to submerge or conform. In their new bill there is one adaptation, a comedy by Frank Wedekind. The other productions bear names as yet unfamiliar on Broadway-Lewis Beach, Philip Moeller, Josephine A. Meyer, Lawrence Langner. These productions represent the real mission of the group.

Nothing about the actual Bandbox Theatre, it must be said, suggests any tempestuous insurgency. In a Pink Room off the lobby there is an exhibition of drawings by Clara Tice. In the lobby itself a handful of dramatic works is on sale. But beyond these two mild divergences the scene is most orthodox. From the Knabe piano to the I. P. Frink Synthetic Stage Lighting Equipment, from the superb carriage-man to the noisy late-comers, everything is ordered in the best Broadway style. If there was anything in Greenwich Village that threatened the deportment of the regular theatre, it has evanesced in the hard trek to 57th street. The ushers, it is true, are still unstereotyped. There is still a chance for excitement in seeking a program. But the carriage-man in livery marks a submissiveness. Long are the tentacles of the octopus New York.

And behind the footlights of the Bandbox Theatre, it seems to me, the octopus is also insinuating its cunning feelers. A great deal of deftness is shown in the manipulation of the little stage. The scenes of the pantomime in the new bill, to give a single instance, are handled with much skill in small compass. The costumes and settings are excellently conceived. A lighter touch is being mastered in the comedies of manner. There is a greater cleverness and wit and badinage. But of originality that would otherwise be compelled to submerge or conform, of genius loosed from the trammels of the regular commercial man

ager, of freedom a-shriek, there are not many traces. In the labor of establishing a medium for the purveyance of their dramas, the Washington Square Players seem to have partially sacrificed the dramas they designed to purvey.

It is not that whimsicality, for example, is not the loveliest use to which a theatre could be turned. The intention back of Mr. Moeller's "Roadhouse in Arden" is an intention the most ingratiating. But what is there to choose between Henry Arthur Jones laboring to be funny in "The Cock o' the Walk" and Mr. Moeller laboring to be funny in his "Roadhouse"? The marriage of Hamlet to Cleopatra was a happy conceit. It alone could have supplied Mr. Moeller with his theme. But that old dreary conjunction of Shakespeare and Bacon, that heavy allegory of immortality and youth-it amused the audience, but it was a second-rate, propelled amusement. On Broadway, yes. This is precisely the level of Broadway. But not as a sample of what our emancipés can do. The margin between excellence and competence may here be very slight, and no one can say Mr. Moeller is not competent. But with such a setting as the Bandbox Theatre provides, with all the aspiration for the Players that is genuinely and widely felt, with Broadway itself so competent, the failure of comedy to perfect itself in an environment so favoring should certainly not be disguised.

And at the risk of seeming doubly serious, I confess to the same lack of elation over the marionette pantomime. Here is a thing that to be captivating should have more than a lively facetiousness and a healthy desire to please. It should not assume its audience to be children. It should, by fancy, grace and surprise, convert its audience into children. Pantomime is the most amusing of all modes of expression, the most graphic, the most artificial, the most difficult. Gloucester was wrong in thinking it easy to "smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive and cog, duck with French nods and apish courtesy." To master this idiom requires an art more consummate than the Washington Square Players even suggested.

In "The Tenor," by Frank Wedekind, however, and especially in "The Clod," by Lewis Beach, the new bill at the Bandbox is a success. It was well worth all the selfindulgent experimentation of the lighter pieces, well worth all the misplaced concession to stock whimsicality and humor, to have made so fortunate a production as "The Clod." If comedy fails it is like a slip in dancing. One risks humiliation. But if tragedy fails one endangers everything. It is like a slip of the surgeon's knife. And that failure, so common in the lacerating, scarring productions of the Grand Guignol, is beautifully avoided in Mr. Beach's short play, "The Clod." Mr. Beach gives us one little incident of the Civil War. In a wretched homestead on the border line between North and South there dwell an elderly farmer and his harassed drudge of a wife. They are invaded by a fugitive and his pursuers. It is a case of "frightfulness." The woman is bullied hatefully. But when at last one of the irate soldiers calls her a "hag" there is a swift and dreadful climax, a flame from the clod. Except for the verbiage of the refugee, the scene rings true. Especally true is the woman.

That the Washington Square Players can discover, stage and manage such genuine pieces as "The Clod" is by all odds the main feature of their experiment. Triumphs may eventually be achieved in bijou productions, pantomimes, skits and "incidental tinklings." But even with symptoms of New York smartness in this direction there is ample compensation in the Clods. F. H.

Books and Things

SOMEWHERE in the writings of a critic whom it is

unsafe for lovers of a quiet life to name nowadays, so great is still his power to irritate our more youthful moderns, it is said that the strongest of all literary influences is that of works upon works. We want to do something different from what has already been done there you have the origin and the active principle of changes in taste and of literary revolutions. If we take a look at contemporary English literature, keeping Brunetière's assertion in mind, we may succeed in wondering why no younger playwright had tried to write plays as different as possible from Bernard Shaw's. Nothing is easier, I admit, than to write plays which lack his wit and his power of effective statement. To achieve this kind of difference we have only to be as fuzzily inarticulate and as dull as it has pleased God to make us. But to write plays or novels which are essentially a denial of Shaw's major premise is a job beneath nobody's powers. It is this major premise which gives him most of his coherence, most of his unity, most of his unlikeness to life. I cannot help wondering why it has provoked no younger writer to accurate symmetrical revolt.

66

Imagine, if you please, an Italian author, either a novelist or a dramatist, who lived in seventeenth century Florence, and who was very brilliant and witty in his attacks upon the notion that heavy bodies fall earthward with velocities proportional to their weights. Imagine him writing a story or a play about a Florentine armorer, who had for years been living apart from his family, who reëntered their lives, who almost at once set about converting them to the true faith of an armorer, namely, that the path described by a projectile, being the result of the combination of a uniform transverse motion with a uniformly accelerated vertical motion, must, apart from the resistance of the air, be a parabola," who kept on expounding this faith until he had converted some members of his family and had deeply impressed them all. Imagine our author classifying his men and women according to their belief or disbelief in the ansated form of Saturn, in the moon's diurnal and monthly librations, in the earth's diurnal motion of rotation, in the immovability of the sun. In one sense, to be sure, such a classification would correspond to reality, just as it is true to-day that the population of Chicago is divided into those who know and those who do not know how to extract the cube root of a given number. And the Italian's would indeed be a more significant classification, because in Italy, in the seventeenth century, if you knew that a man eagerly accepted or as eagerly repudiated Galileo's beliefs you already knew a good deal about him.

Shaw's classification of men and women is even more significant. His comedy, if we lump all his plays together and overlook their variations from type, challenges what passes current as good sense to have another look at itself, to listen to questions, to admit doubts, to conclude that it isn't good sense after all. The mistakes made by his mistaken persons involve whole ways of looking at the whole world. Being also extremely widespread and popular, with the most respectable labels gummed all over them, they have forced upon Shaw the task of manufacturing a public opinion which can see these mistakes as he sees them, and condemn them with his condemnation. In playing against them he has very wisely loaded the dice. He has represented the persons whose opinions he thinks right as out

arguing and triumphing over the persons whose opinions he thinks wrong, as nearly always victorious in discussion. Nor is this all. His critics of popular morality are represented as not only victorious in particular discussions, but as many sizes larger intellectually than popular morality's defenders. Shaw's major premise is that the way to find. out what is best worth knowing about a man is to ask whether his most general ideas are Shaw's or not Shaw's.

This I put forward not as a description of Shaw comedy, but only of that comedy when regarded solely as a possible provocation to younger writers who are looking for a chance to innovate. From my standpoint it wouldn't much matter whether they thought Shaw's opinions right or wrong. They might be willing to concede, their plays or novels might even be the gainers if they conceded, that Shaw's opinions and right opinions are interchangeable terms. Looking about them with their eyes open they would notice that although it takes brains to acquire right opinions when these are new, right opinions which are old are often found in heads without brains. They would admit that brains otherwise exceptionally powerful often entertain the very wrongest opinions, and often lack general ideas of any kind. Their novels and plays would be written to emphasize now the impotence of intellectual strength when coupled with a totally wrong view of the world, now the negligibility of right views when their holder is a duffer. The innovator's game, you see, would be merely to insist that the rightness or wrongness of a man's opinions upon institutions or morals does not necessarily imply what it nearly always implies in Shaw comedy, and that to classify people according to their opinions is to make only one of many possible and significant classifications.

Realists on one side, romantic idealists and sentimentalists on the other this division of mankind has been in Shaw's hands a lethal and glittering sword, but any such arbitrary division is unjust to the complexity of the world. You couldn't measure Samuel Pepys by such a ruler. He was a realist in business. Mr. Wheatley goes so far as to call him one of the ablest men that ever lived." His general ideas are fairly represented by his fancy that death would be no bad thing if it were one long dream of Lady Castlemaine. Pepys couldn't get into Shaw comedy without getting defaced and diminished. Neither could Cardinal Newman, a formidable antagonist in discussion, but possessed of general opinions which would make him appear in Shaw comedy as he did to Carlyle, who said he had or had not, I forget which, “the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit.”

In our own day we need look no further in our search for a man not to be judged by his opinions, say, of current morality, than Mr. Elihu Root. He has never examined current morality with his real mind, has never taught his followers that it is right to do something commonly deemed wrong, or wrong to do something commonly deemed all right. This is true of him, and by no means irrelevant. But to see Mr. Root so is to see only a small part of him. I should like to read a novel, or see a play, in which he was the central figure, in which he would out-argue all his opponents, would triumph over everybody else in discussion, would be dialectically victorious all along the line, and in which events, stronger and more persuasive than any of his human adversaries, would end by confuting him utterly, by putting him to rout, by proving that his most imbecile opponent had been right in opinion.

P. L.

"The Immortal Residue"

Verse, by Adelaide Crapsey. Rochester, New York: The Manas Press.

A

T the foot of one of these verses there are the sinister words "Saranac Lake, N. Y., 1914." The last year of Miss Crapsey's life was spent in exile at a "health" resort there. She died October 8th, 1914, aged thirty-five.

That she was young, that she regretted to give up life, and that she was doomed to die, we know from this writer herself. But one must say respectfully that it is to ask too little of art to confuse its appeal with the person's. Genuine poetry is not dependent on a special situation. It provides its own setting. It is Miss Crapsey's triumph that in spite of an alien appeal she was an exquisite artist.

These verses are in one sense the flower of a fatality. They were written in the shadow of death and they commemorate the hours that escorted the poet to her end. But so finely did Miss Crapsey avail herself of her circumstance that she integrated it, a peculiarly unhappy circumstance, into peculiarly delicate and touching poetry.

Certain five-line stanzas in a form her own may be quoted to illustrate Miss Crapsey's greatest gift, a decorative one. In the heightened and narrowed intensity of these impressions one may detect a pathology. They are written by moonlight rather than sunlight, thin, eliminative, crepuscular. But each one of them has witchery. The first is a thing overheard, November Night:

author, they are strangely eloquent. For a strong sense of that author's personality accumulates. It is pleasantly acquired from the reverential quaintness of a "CradleSong." It is satisfied by a dry wit in "Expenses" and a free romance in "The Witch." It is deepened by such images as she gives of the landscape from which she shrank, "Grey road, grey fields, wind and a bitter rain." But the most predisposing poems are those that frankly or mordantly dwell on death and make of her book a veritable "funeral

And if the many sayings of the wise
Teach of submission I will not submit,
But with a spirit all unreconciled
Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.
Better it is to walk, to run, to dance,
Better it is to laugh and leap and sing,
To know the open skies of dawn and night,
To move untrammeled down the flaming noon,
And I will clamor it through weary days
Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp,
Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips
Of resignation, sister to defeat.

I'll not be patient. I will not lie still.

This quotation is not so characteristic of Miss Crapsey as those in which she exhibited her sharp delight in designin pellucid phrasing, in definite vision, in cadence crisp and sweet. "The Lonely Death" is more characteristic:

In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;

I will shutter the windows from light,

I will place in their sockets the four

Tall candles and set them aflame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.

Cold fire like this is rare. It is to be found in more than one of these verses. It came out of the most real of all desires, the desire for mere life.

When Charles Lamb wrote his confessions of a drunkard he gave an intensely intimate experience. He appealed to his reader's social consciousness as well as his æsthetic, and moved him as by a personal interview. It was effectual, but there was something about it that Lamb instinctively disliked. He threatened, as I dimly recall, to amplify his revelations by publishing the harrowing memoirs of a waterdrinker. Such a reaction is certainly understandable. Direct experience is suggestive to all creative artists, but it is a limited spirit that confines itself to direct experiences, and a dull and literal soul that seeks so to attribute creation. What an artist feels and says is personally conditioned. The more we know about the artist as a person, the more intelligible, in one sense, his work becomes. The epilepsy of Dostoevsky, the opium of Coleridge, the Catholicism of Francis Thompson, the affluence of Browning, the unhappy marriage of George Meredith-these things were influential, affected their victims' susceptibility, determined in some degree their production. It is inevitable that such facts should be considered. But discretion has to be used in giving heed to autobiography. Art cannot be grossly esti

mated as a human document. Criticism cannot be converted into a perpetual discussion and elucidation of personalities. An artist is first of all concerned with the realities that he encompassed and administrates. It is these, not the personality through which he attains his realities, that should chiefly be considered.

Just for this reason too great emphasis may be placed on Miss Crapsey's fate. Sensations of pity may mingle with, and vitiate, sensations of beauty. But her emotion was true and poignant, her craft exacting, her spirit the artist's. She should be reckoned and warmly cherished as a poet. F. H.

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Walter Bagehot

The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot: With a Life by Mrs. Russell Barrington. Ten Volumes. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $25.00 net.

ΤΗ

HE reputation of Walter Bagehot has in nowise diminished in the forty years that have passed since his death. People are beginning to understand a little of the lasting significance of what he achieved. He was the first man to make finance arrestingly intelligible to ordinary men and women. It is no longer possible to whisper of Lombard Street as of a home of certain Eleusinian mysteries. It was Bagehot's triumph that he made the Bank act pass into the current coin of conversation. That English constitution which Blackstone deformed, and de Tocqueville almost failed to discover, it is no exaggeration to say he in some sense created. Certainly his influence is directly perceptible in the form and content of its modern history. Nor was this all. He was probably the first man adequately to appreciate the significance of Darwinism for social theory. Despite nearly fifty years of progressive interpretation, not even the general acceptanee of Weismannism has supplanted his "Physics and Politics" as incomparably the best introduction to its subject. And when it is remembered that these books are only a tithe of his work, that he struggled all his life with ill-health and domestic misfortune, that he was at once a banker and the editor of the most important political weekly of his time, it is difficult to resist the judgment that his was among the most creative minds of the nineteenth century.

What was his secret? It lay, surely, in the vigorous clarity of his insight. Bagehot had the supreme good fortune to be probably the most brilliant amateur of the Victorian age. If he had a profession it was that of the interested but detached observer. He had that kind of mind which is at once methodical and penetrating. It seemed impossible to conceal from him the heart of any subject. The youth of twenty-five who witnessed the coup d'état of 1851 had but in 1870 to re-edit his early prediction-perhaps with a little less ungenial irony. Add to that quality a pen which was able invariably and effortlessly to say his thought in words precisely calculated to convey it, and one begins to have some general idea of the nature of the high service he performed.

Rightly to understand him one ought perhaps to begin with the "Physics and Politics" and regard the rest of his work as the consequence of that effective naturalism. The strength of that book lies in the vivid way in which he entraps in a phrase the elusive secret of primitive personality, the quick, almost startling manner in which he reveals it, so that its significance flashes almost upon the consciousness. It was here that he served the need Mr. Graham

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Wallas has supplied so brilliantly in our own day-that of making all political analysis fundamentally psychological. He is never satisfied until he has related institutions to men; and his men are almost hauntingly the people you can meet every day in Broadway or the Strand. It was, in fact, his discovery that man is neither a demigod nor a fallen angel. He took his stand by an ape-ancestry and did not shrink from the conclusion that man is therefore human.

So that when he came to the analysis of political and economic conditions he had already the equipment of a faultless method. Whether you read "Lombard Street" or the more abstract Economic Studies," the whole value of them lies in their psychological naturalism. All Bagehot's work is essentially dynamic in conception. He does not attempt, because he disapproves, the crude statics of the orthodox economist. "Lombard Street" is not the analysis of an ideal banking system to be found, possibly, in Utopia. It is the simple study of what happens when seven middleaged merchants in the city of London manage a very special institution in a very special way. That the financial system of the world depended upon their success would have interested him less than the fact that from the study of their methods and results he could depict the working psychology of the average business man. The reviewers who called it as fascinating as a novel were, for once, exactly right. It was a novel because it was a picture, an interpretation, of an important piece of life. It remains as the classic description of an economic institution at work.

His approach to the "English Constitution" is in nowise dissimilar. Institutions are to him the expression of character; and so he views King, Lords, and Commons as secreted in the nature of Englishmen. It is less important