NEW BOOKS

THE WINDOWS OF WESTMINSTER-A Gentleman with a Duster-Putnam ($2.50).

Came, fortnight ago, a book by the gentleman with a duster. It analyzed, portrayed, epitomized British governmental character.

Excerpts:

Baldwin. CHARACTER: "Here is a plain, blunt, simple-hearted countryman. . . . For good or for evil, his personality entirely lacks the flick of a cocktail. He is genuine cider. The small pinched-up eyes, with their uplifted brows, have the shrewdness of the shepherd rather than the sharpness of the merchant; the deep, grave, kindly voice has no note of drawing-room or art coterie, but the tone of a slow, pondering, decisive country mind. He is a man of action, but his activity suggests the fields and not the city. He is quick with humour and not a sluggard in the matter of wit; but both his humour and his wit never suggest the smokingroom and the dinner-party, but rather the open sky and a prospect of shining hills. I think he has something of the peasant's obstinacy and is not altogether free from a certain obtuseness.

. . . "Also it is said of him that while his heart entitles him to the respect and even the affection of mankind, the quality of his intellect is such as constantly to flabbergast his best friends."

BELIEFS: "And he cherishes the hope that it may be in the destinies of Providence that he should win for an enlightened Conservatism this confidence of the self-respecting workers of the country, and that at the head of such a disciplined and self-respecting party he should be able to bring Capital and Labour to a good understanding, and live to see the prosperity of his country established on foundations which nothing can shake-the British Empire the greatest power in the world for peace, justice, and virtue."

Neville Chamberlain: "He holds that the working-classes of the country are responsive to the imperial sentiment. The imperial relationship, he will tell you, is as real to the poor man as to the rich. The poor man may not have the same exalted vision of the imperial destiny as the educated and the traveled man, but he does feel in his blood that the British Empire is something to be proud of. . . . He is a social reformer. He would call himself a Radical, and would not be greatly discomposed if someone called him a Socialist. He believes that every generation is an

Wide World

SIR DOUGLAS HOGG Quick with challenge.

opportunity for making things better, and that there are conditions in this country crying aloud for reform."

Hogg. CHARACTER: "I think it would be true to say that his intellect has a punch in it, but not his personality. It is the fist of Carpentier, but the soul of Joe B.ckett. One feels that if his intellectual equipment had been at the disposal of any ambitious politician it could not have failed to make its mark, and perhaps a permanent mark, on contemporary politics. . . . He suggests in his appearance that he would like fighting and dislike dirt. There is something military in his carriage and something pugilistic in his precise and vigorous face. He is also one of those men on whose clear and fine skin soap and water seem to produce a sheen or a glow, such as the manufacturers of a boot polish assure the world is a pedal consequence of using their particular cream. He stands very upright and square-shouldered, with a rather commanding tilt to his head, and a look in his eyes, when he is opposed, which is quick with challenge."

Lloyd-Greame. CHARACTER: "Philip Lloyd-Greame is unquestionably one of the ablest men now in Parliament, and one of the most eager and energetic. He has the economic facts of the British Empire at his fingers' ends, and his brain is a series of pigeon-holes stuffed with the documents of world trade . . . laughing at ant-heaps. . . . I regard him as a man of the very highest promise, and one who may yet do as much for the prosperity of the British Empire as any man now living."

SOCIALISM CRITICAL AND CONSTRUCTIVE -J. Ramsay MacDonald-Bobbs Merrill ($3.00).

A great deal has been heard in the British and U. S. press concerning the analogy of British Socialism to Russian Bolshevism; but hear what the exPremier has to say about Karl Marx, whose writings are the Bolshevik Bible: "Today, Marx is known over as wide a world as even Christ or Mohammed. . . . His writings, largely unread, are held as inspired. . . . The validity of his economic theories is more than doubtful; his historical philosophy is in the same position."

The doctrines of Marx are not accepted by the ex-Premier, much less the Bolshevik interpretation of them. Socialism for him is a communal democracy in which universal service is obligatory upon the people-to be performed by the people, for the people.

Here is probably the clearest exposition of practical Socialism that has yet been written, and, if the theory is overcharged with idealism, it is also permeated with lofty and religious concern for the welfare of humanity which claims for it a fair hearing.

GERMAN WHITE BOOK and PRELIMINARY HISTORY OF THE ARMISTICEedited by James Brown Scott-Orford University Press ($2.00 each). Two books of extraordinary interest to the public have been edited for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace by James Brown Scott. These books are couched in clear, precise English and present the lowest common denominator of the German contentions regarding responsibility for the outbreak of the War and the conditions under which she signed the Armistice. Considering the enormous flood of propaganda that has been loosed by both sides to cover these two cardinal points in the history of the past decade, this concrete evidence is of more than academic interest.

Growing Pains*

The Education of Julie Cane

was

The Story. "The doctor .. holding up, like a butcher, by the hind legs, a little animal the size of a sucking pig." Thus Julie Cane makes her appearance in Findellen.

Her father was an unsuccessful grocer. This business he had acquired by the misadventure of matrimonial union with Annie Sowers, whose hair was red, even as had been his mother's. Their faith in each other suffered early dissolution due to an ill-considered assertion on his part to the effect that hot bricks do not burn bedclothes. Resultant smoldering sheets and mattress consumed with them the Cane's insecure romance.

Cane's chief interest in life was not groceries. It was science. Through the long suburban evenings, he burned the oil of his lamp over Flammarion and Darwin, mentally roving the ages and the heavens, weaving complicated theories of Man and his motives, Science and its future.

Father and daughter entered into conspiracy against the mother, a religious maniac with none of the other basic instincts of humanity. Father taught daughter to read, to figure, to think. He untaught her all that her mother tried to teach. Above all, he taught her to keep her own counsel, to retire into the castle of her own intelligence, safe against the shafts of her neighbors.

Julie was forced to leave Sunday school, owing to certain injudicious queries respecting the relative dimensions of arks and mastodons. Coercion by Mrs. Cane of the Misses Perrin obtained her admittance to those spinsters' exclusive school.

Here Julie, precocious and solemn, became acquainted with Alan Birdsall. Ensued stormy romance. Alan called her "Sugar Cane." She retaliated triumphantly with "Birdseed." Alan, spoiled, tempestuous, self-centred, alternately persecuted and fondled her, all of which she received with grave interest.

Due to an ill-considered expedition to a bedroom occupied by Julie and her wealthy friend, Alice Carey, Alan and his mother left Findellen. Julie was relieved. She began to grow up, still under the devoted guidance of her father. Her friendship for Alice Carey continued. An almost hysterical love sprang up between her and old Martha Perrin, mistress of her school.

Then Alan, 21 years old, came back to Findellen, matured, attractive, hu

JULIE CANE--Harvey O'Higgins-Harper ($2.00).

morous but with all the unbalanced egotism of his childhood. With him came Bayard Van Schoeck, friendly patrician. Alan's reawakened passion frightened Julie. She found protection in the steady strength of Van Schoeck. The climax came in a meeting between Alan and her father. Sparks flew. The old man hit the boy with her parasol, then collapsed under stress of emotion.

Julie refused to see Alan againever. Van Schoeck spanked him. Old Mr. Cane died of double pneumonia, despite efforts of a distinguished physician called by Van Schoeck.

Alan married Alice Carey, in a petulant rebound from Julie. Julie married Van Schoeck. Everyone lived happily ever after-demonstrating the possibility of the impossible.

The Significance. This volume is a study of the post-natal creation of a human personality. Old Mr. Cane looked like what he ostensibly wasa suburban grocer. Beneath the white apron and the shy, dull face, he had made of his intelligence a realm of power and beauty, impervious to human contempt. His neighbors could not touch the essential power that was in him and which he passed on to his daughter.

So, by shrewd, devoted guidance, he made of Julie a fine, proud spirit, capable of coping with the problems of her mature life-self-sufficient, free.

A student of psychoanalysis, Mr. O'Higgins lays gentle, never pedantic, emphasis on the "secret springs" of conduct. Mr. Cane's red-headed mother is the explanation of his union with red-headed Annie Sowers. The red hair of Alan's passionately beloved mother is again accountable for Alan's curious mental attitude toward Julie Cane.

The book is about as notable a piece of work as the autumn has produced. Mr. O'Higgins' style is eminently readable, his vision penetrating. He has created in Mr. Cane a winning, living picture, full of pathos and triumphant. dignity. His portrait of Julie is no less a finished study of a strange and intriguing personality.

A legal career

The Author. Harvey O'Higgins is a man of 48, tall and slender, with keen, sensitive features and a quiet grey eye. He was born and educated in Canada, of British parentage. had originally been planned for him; but the lure of the pen led him into newspaper and magazine work which, in turn, took him to New York. The Youth's Companion was his first literary medium. His chief previous publications are From the Life, Some Distinguished Americans, The American Mind in Action, The Secret Springs.

Ringding Gelong Lama

OM. THE SECRET OF AHBOR VALLEY Talbot Mundy Bobbs Merril ($2.00). Ommony-who knew as much about India as any white man could know-sought his sister and her husband in the Ahbor Valley, whence no man ever returned. He sought also the secret of the broken bit of green jade and of the wise old Ringding Gelong Lama, who had an Oxford degree and was found to be importing European little girls into the Ahbor Valley.

All these things were duly uncovered. with the help of the kindly wisdom of the Lama and his marvelous chela,* so that Ommony found himself at the end with a mission on his shouldersa mission as strange and solemn as any that man has shouldered. Others of his fellow-adventurers on the secret Middle Way were Dawa Tserin, intricatelywedded hillsman with the mind of a child and the saw-edge knife; Diana, epitome of canine sagacity; Maitraya. bumptious actor.

A wild, mysterious tale of India is this, sprinkled with the oriental wisdom of Tsiang Samdup.

Salvation

THE HEAVENLY LADDER Compton Mackenzie-Doran ($2.50). Mr. Mackenzie has been for some time occupied with the spiritual salvation of Mark Lidderdale. The Altar Steps and The Parson's Progress have already brought him into the Anglican ministry. In The Heavenly Ladder, he has taken a living in Nancepan, minute fishing and farming parish. He sets to work to startle the population into salvation, introducing the most advanced rituals of Church of England Catholicism. The horrified villagers retaliate by savagely underhanded attacks on the man who, to their minds, is guilty of extremest blasphemy. Finally, he finds peace in the great Benedictine monasteries of Italy. Mr. Mackenzie's work is notable for spiritual vision.

Ruminations

UNMAILED LETTERS-Joseph H. Odell -Dutton ($2.50). Joseph H. Odell, now head of great philanthropic interests in Delaware, identified with the DuPonts, wrote a number of intimate. introspective letters to his friends. Too shy to mail them, he has published them. Religion, the English countryside, literature and dreams, flowering Japan, Burmah, the East, are his themes.

"Life is like cards, only with this difference-everyone has to play several hands simultaneously." "After all, the

*Disciple.

His article "Peter Sat by the Fire Warming Himself" in the Atlantic Monthly, Febru ary, 1918, mercilessly excoriated U. S. clergy men for their supine neutrality during 1914 17

old hymns are right, and life is a pilgrimage." "The English not only take their pleasure sadly, but they have even learned to take their sadness pleasantly." "Perhaps the only real failure is that implying waste."

Elinor Wylie

Magic of Words and of Past Centuries

Your editor has given me a list of names of authors whom he desires to be limned in this column. Some of them I have met. Some are strangers to me in the flesh; but, willy nilly, I am determined to write a column concerning them. First, is Elinor Wylie, born in Washington, married now to William Rose Benét, living in rural Connecticut, writing vigorously on a new novel.

She

Mrs. Benét is tall, pale, with classical features and a detached manner. looks very young indeed, years younger than she probably is; but she is one of those women who, when she reaches forty, will still appear to be just under or just over thirty. She should have lived in the Renaissance. She has an air of other-world remoteness and of the color of romance as well. Her writing was started only a few years ago; but the finely spun, exquisitely phrased verses, now collected in Nets to Catch the Wind and Black Armour were immediately recognized as authentic contributions to the lists of American poets. She then turned to prose and her delicately wrought, colorful, ironical Jennifer Lorn is a book which is almost too good to be true. In style and in form she imitated in it the mannered seventeenth century and her characters emerge through a screen of rare words and colors. In her new book, to be called perhaps A Venetian Glass Nephew, she dwells partly in a realm of magic. She has made scholarly investigations so that her descriptions of the black art are accurately in tradition. She chooses as one of her characters the roguish Casanova-a background character only, I believe.

Here is a quaint imagination, a fine wit, a delicate style. One first thinks of it as fragile, then realizes that in reality Elinor Wylie's work would be robust were it only in consideration of her technical perfection. I like to think of her now in an old Connecticut house, surrounded by the demands of several children, yet creating quite calmly and steadily a manuscript fit to be traced upon vellum and illuminated by monks in cloisters, something rich, rare and only very gently indecorous. J. F.

New Plays

Peter Pan. It is ever so long since one could go to Never-Never Land without taking a real steamship to get

MARILYNN MILLER She danced too wisely.

there. A great many children have grown up in the meantime. But perhaps it is just as well that the interim was a long one, for, inevitably, NeverNever Land has changed.

When Mr. Charles Dillingham went there this fall with Mr. Basil Dean, Author Barrie's special ambassador to the U. S., they saw to it that the forest grew enormously, that the Indians multiplied, that the pirate crew recruited many a new hand and the funny old pirate ship became a thundering big frigate. "You would hardly know the old place," people said when Mr. Dillingham opened the doors and took them in last week.

Then there was another big difference. Maude Adams was not there.

People who had always seen Maude Adams there before missed her terribly. They remembered what a quizzical Peter she was, how wistful, how shy, how genuinely joyous, how she tugged at your heartstrings and did all the little things "just right." This time, Marilynn Miller was there instead, ever so pretty; light and bright and fair as a fairy. Happy, too-but that was just it. She was too happy, like a musical comedy

girl. And she danced too well, too wisely.

But the lucky thing is that most of the people that will go to see the new Peter Pan, the changed Never-Never Land, will be youngish people that do not remember very well. Or so young that they never saw Maude Adams at all. Other people matter, of course, but not as much as the youngish ones. They all loved Miss Miller. They never noticed that her voice was a shade shallow and twangy, or that Wendy was a mite too old, or Hook a spot stagey. Being modern children, they might have been disappointed had the company been more impromptu and not quite so technically competent.

As things go on, all the players will get easier, more friendly and familiar with their audiences, remembering that Peter Pan is much more a party for every one than a stage play.

Alexander Woollcott-"Miss Miller was followed by a shadow which could not be nipped off by all the nursery windows in Christendom . . . the shadow of Miss Adams."

Annie Dear. Billie Burke has been prying about for a good play without success so long that her husband (F. Ziegfeld) tired of the search. He proposed to bring her back to musical comedy. Since her husband is quite without a rival in producing musical entertainment, Miss Burke consented. The outcome was innie Dear.

Clare Kummer was summoned to set to music her engaging comedy, Good Gracious, Annabelle. This will be remembered as a feathery adventure of an original young lady and a fierce cave man whom she reformed. It was chiefly characterization, unexpected remarks and utter nonsense. Apparently its elusive, airy quality confused Mr. Ziegfeld. He added toward the last a thunderous episode in slapstick and a beautiful ballet. The slapstick was funny and the ballet was a bore. The early episodes in the unadulterated Kummer quality made the show attractively successful.

Miss Burke, still brilliantly youthful, seized all the honors of the happy event although the cast included, with the usual Ziegfeld prodigality, Ernest Truex, Marion Green, Bobby Watson and May Vokes. Her voice is a pretty toy to be played with rather than taken seriously. Possibly the relative unimportance of the music made it seem Not that it mattered. The play and the character are more than an evening's entertainment.

So.

Percy Hammond-"Miss Billie Burke was never more enchanting than she was as the irresponsible Annabelle who married a hermit because his whiskers tickled her."

Heywood Broun-"The first act a

high tide on the beaches of delight. The second well enough. The third . . . dreadful."

S. S. Glencairn. The Provincetown Players started their season with a foggy fantasm called The Crime in the Whistler Room and critics sighed. Were the promising group (headed by Kenneth MacGowan, Robert Edmond Jones, Stark Young, and Eugene O'Neill) going to break promises? S. S. Glencairn stifles sighs. Promises of provocative and capably significant drama are being kept. These four oneact plays are among the very few evening's worth of money and mind on the present playbill.

The title is taken from the bow of that slouchy tramp in which Eugene O'Neill set his crew of sailor men for The Moon of the Caribbees. It is a comprehensive title to cover that play and three of the group published in book form under the Caribbees title. Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone and The Long Voyage Home are the companion pieces. They are all sea stories, done in the early O'Neill style, when the first indications of Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape were stirring in his brain. Since the plays have been played and published for some time, their content is familiar. It only remains to be noted that the Provincetown group set and performed them notably. There are no star parts which pull above the surface the heads of one player or another. As a company, they give a singularly complete performance.

Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:

Drama

RAIN-Religion and morality mildewed by the ceaseless downpour of a South Sea Island.

WHITE CARGO-Going farther than usual in point of plot by mixing the white and the black in its discussion of disintegrated character in extremely foreign lands.

CONSCIENCE-A fairly flabby play of how a rotten husband will rot his wife's existence, blown to high pressure by the startling performance of Lillian Foster.

COBRA-Through the sundown summer season, this melodrama of the temptress Eve story twitched its tail Iravely and with the coming of the new season has wriggled to renewed popularity:

S S. GLENCAIRN-Reviewed in this issue.

WHAT PRICE GLORY?-Mud, the marines and one French girl found somewhere in France. An ironic War memorial that has not been equaled on the stage.

Comedy

THE WEREWOLF-In which the paprica pot of sex is skillfully sprinkled

by Laura Hope Crews, Leslie Howard and Marion Coakley.

MINICK-American and mordantly middle-class narrative to the effect that old folks and young wont biend.

THE FARMER'S WIFE-Devonshire comedy in which Mr. and Mrs. Coburn are supplying a rural and uproarious commentary on marrying at five and fifty.

THE SHOW-OFF-The life and works of an irresistible self-confidence man. EXPRESSING WILLIF-Laughing up the sleeve of the modern youth, the modern business man, Expressionism and the other current foibles of family life.

THE GUARDSMAN-Is a great actor great enough to deceive his wife; and if so would sh admit it? Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. GROUNDS 1 OR DIVORCE-A skillful company goingver the familiar process of remarrying a husband, with Ina Claire particularly prevalent.

Musical

In the girl and music department, the following are most divertingly displaye': Kid Boots, The Grab Bag, Rose-Marie, The Dream Girl, I'll Say She Is. Grond Street Follies, Scandals, Ziegfe'd Follies, Ritz Revue, Annie Dear, Dixie to Broadway.

Firmin Gémier

Py the express invitation of Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes, acting in the name of the U. S. Government, M. Firmin Gémier, who has for many years been the director of Le Théâtre National de l'Odéon of Paris, arrived in the U. S. to produce some of his famous plays. The invitation was not merely a courteous act toward M. Gémier, but a gracious_recognition of France as

Mère des passions, des arts et des talents;

Qui, peuplant l'univers de fantômes brillants,

Et d'espoir tour à tour et de crainte suivic,

Ou dere ou rembrunit le tableau de la vie.

For the first time M. Gémier comes to the U. S. and in Manhattan is producing and acting plays by Lenormand, Frondale, Berr and Verneuil, Gorsse and Forect. Molière, Beaumarchais, Fabre, Shakespeare.

M. Gémier was born in 1865, was a young led when Germany laid seig t Paris. He was brought up to be a parfumeur, for, as his parents remarked i y a là besucoup d'argent à ganner Un. fortunately for the perfumery business, and fortunately for the theatre, the youthful Gémier developed an immense facility for mimicry. Once he imitated his employer so successfully that the latter, arriving inopportunely, became angry and nently discharged him.

As an actor in the provinces, he grad ually built up a name for himself, al

ways breaking away from the hars mechanical traditions of the Classical Age and reserving to himself an intell gent freedom of interpretation. Finay recognized officially, not so much for his acting as for his ability to prod and manage, the Government made him directeur du Théâtre National de l'Odéon.

Although he is almost famous a Paris, this French Max Reinhardt is unfortunately comparatively little known abroad. The reason for this is hard to find; but it probably is that France has recently produced nothing of moment, while Germany has provided, for example, Masse Mensch.

In the French estimation, to be direc tor of La Comédie Française is to reach the pinnacle of the theatre world. But many there are who prefer France's second national theatre, the Odéon; for, in spite of its less famous history, it has managed to retain a certain air that is pure to all ages. Perhaps that is due to its surroundings rather than to its associations.

Start, say from the Musée de Cluny, and stroll up the "Boul Mich" as far as the Jardin de Luxembourg. On the left is the Panthéon, proudly bearing its inscription Aux Grands Hommes la Patric Reconnaissante. With these thoughts the boulevard must be crossed: and down the Rue de Médicis, past the famous fountain of the same name, the massive square Odéon looms up across the intersecting Rue de Vaugirard. Along the near side runs a colonnade under which the booksellers still have their stalls as they used to long ago when the Odéon was called the Théâtre de la Nation. Here in the Quartier Latin is the Paris which lives in intimate acquaintance with the past. And in the Odéon, the fertile mind and the strong voice of M. Gémier resurrects that past in a spirit that is psychologi cally human. T. J. C. M.

CINEMA

New Picture

He Who Gets Slapped. It had been venturesome to suggest that the stage version of He could be ameliorated, or even approached by another, least of all by a cinema version. Perhaps that cannot be said now. Yet if the screen was ever moving, if producers have ever credited their patrons with perception sufficient to be delighted by suggestion, by nuance of lighting, gesture and stage-composition, for the expression of valid emotions, then these things have come to pass again. Playwright Andreyev has Victor Seastrom to thank for directing, Lon Chaney for acting, a highly authentic recreation. “He," one recalls, is a much-slapped circus clown, beloved by the world only for a buffoonery which he wrings from the shattered, poignant remnant of a life known to none but himself.

Opera

Aristocracy has always permitted itIf a rather cautious association with he Arts. The tonsorial standards of legance may be prohibitive to the bundant locks of genius. But the works of genius, the children of the pulently thatched brain of creative art, lave never been questioned as the apurtenance of polite splendor. The all-marks of Society must be conspicuous. Therein is the serene excellence of music. All the world-all the world that is a world-is there to see you listen to symphony or opera and to be seen by you.

Smooth gliding Hispano-Suizas, Minervas, gracefully imperious Renaults, the more conventional Rolls-Royces have begun again to deposit their precious burdens at the sacrosanct portals of the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan, of the Auditorium, Chicago. Venerable gentlemen in the prosperousseeming splendor of Prince Alberts and silk hats unlock doors and let down chains. First an excited jabbering line, clutching the arduously saved dollars of their admission, a shoving and a scurrying, and the standees find their places between the red plush rail an the red plaster wall. They are admitted with a discreet promptitude to make way for the diamond-studdel throng of sagaciously tardy Societydiplomats, titled foreigners, valuably accoutred dowagers, stiffly-starched

magnates.

The opera has opened again, before the most brilliant and enthusiastic audiences since the War. The Season has begun.

It had been supposed that the Metropolitan would choose for its opening Fedora, Maria Jeritza's latest triumphant impersonation. But Signor GattiCasazza, shrewd impressario, had planned otherwise. Verdi, well-tried veteran, was called into service and Aida was the safe and sane choice, with a familiar safe and sane cast. There was no Caruso, no Farrar, no Jeritza. There was instead a new conductor, one Tullio Serafin, carefully discriminating and strangely energetic after the somnolent Mr. Moranzoni.

Mr. Serafin is a conductor of European fame. He was at one time assistant conductor with Toscanini at La Scala. He has conducted in Ferrera; Buenos Ayres; Madrid; Covent Garden, London; the Champs Élysées, Paris. He has taught at the Milan Conservatory, Montemezzi one of his pupils. Aged 46, he looks youngera serious thick-set Italian, dominating, vital.

Jeritza's triumph came later in the first week. Wagner's Tannhauser was her medium. Never more beautiful to the eye, she succeeded in making the

too-good-to-be-true Elisabeth almost pathetically human. Herr Laubenthal in the title rôle saved himself no effort, and therein lay his defeat.

Chaliapin's first Boris of the season met with a conflicting reception. Greeted enthusiastically by the audience and most critics, Ernest Newman,

Keystone

CHALIAPIN

Great voice gone?

brilliant guest critic of The New York Evening Post (TIME, Oct. 13), was disappointed. He had not heard the Russian basso in this rôle since 1914. He found the great voice gone, the acting self-conscious.

In Chicago, too, a conductor was the hero of the première. The presentation of La Gioconda, Ponchielli's opera, was a triumph not alone for the ever-popular Rosa Raisa in the title rôle, but chiefly for Giorgio Polacco, orchestral alchemist, who turned the good showmanship and occasionally melodiously inspirational score of Ponchielli's ponderous work into the semblance of a piece of true art. His genius not only led him to underscore the dramatic situations which are the opera's chief virtue, but to give rare opportunity to the singers themselves, chorus and principals, to make the most of the vocal tone which is so important in Italian opera, where the singer is more than anywhere else the thing.

The opening of the second week at the Metropolitan was no less a triumph for Maria Jeritza, Lohengrin her medium. Other features of the second lap of the season in that temple of patrician appreciation were Andrea Chenier and The Tales of Hoffmann (revival)-well-tried pieces both.

Features of the week at Chicago's auditorium were Lucia, presenting for the first time Toti dal Monte, soprano; Tannhauser, with another new conductor, Mr. Weber; Samson and Delilah. The ever-popular Rosa Raisa's second appearance of the season was in Aïda, last Saturday night.

Church Bells

Memories of My Childhood is the name of Charles Martin Loeffler's new symphonic poem. He reminisces in music of a time when he did not know he would be a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, nor a famous composer. Opening with church bells, the poem sings of a Russian village, Smiela, where as a boy Loeffler heard "Russian peasant songs, the Yonrod's Litany-prayer, fairy tales and dance songs." Here is a novelty. So far, it has been given only by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

A New Ideal

"As some men have a passion for horses, and some for women, so have I a passion for locomotives," Honegger tells us. He even worships monster engines, their speed, their strength, their noise. His Pacific 231-played recently by Mr. Damrosch's orchestra in Manhattan-was inspired by, and dedicated to Engine No. 231. Should a real, live locomotive burst into the concert hall, the effect would be no less terrifying than that produced by Honegger's short piece, so vivid is his portraiture.

In Vienna

Opinion is divided regarding the resignation of Richard Strauss, famed composer, from the Vienna Opera. The resignation was the result of differences of opinion existing between Strauss and Franz Schalk, his co-director. Strauss wanted many new programs. Schalk favored less innovation on economic grounds.

Many feel that Strauss has acted pettishly. He is accused of ingratitude to the city which has spread his fame and built him a little palace, set in princely gardens. Strauss excuses his long absences from the city on the ground that he needed money. This, too, is resented. Strauss is known to be well off.

It is suspected that Strauss's wrath at Vienna is due to the unenthusiastic reception accorded his last two premières. He is a popular composer, but the critics did not hesitate to comment in a manner the reverse of complimentary on the two pieces. Strauss