AUSTRIA

Misericordia Domini

In Vienna, Karl Jaworek faced judge and jury to answer for attempting the assassination of ex-Chancellor Ignaz Seipel (TIME, June 9). To the court was read a penitent letter from the accused to his victim. The minimum sentence is usually five years hard labor. Then Dr. Seipel appeared to give evidence.

In his breast was the bullet which Jaworek fired; in his soul was misericordia Domini. In the space of four minutes, this ascetic, pale and nervous priest said that his illness following the attack was in part owing to diabetes and that he felt for the prisoner "in a spirit of forgiveness." Jaworek sobbed. The jury found him guilty; the judge, taking into consideration his mental inferiority, sentenced him to three and a half years hard labor; and he was ordered to fast one day in every quarter.

Star Turn

ITALY

Benito Mussolini, indefatigable Premier of Italy, did his star turn again. Having secured a vote of confidence on his foreign policy from the Deputies (TIME, Nov. 24), another on his domestic policy (TIME, Dec. 1), having told the Fascisti that there must henceforward be "silent work, perfect discipline, and no individual or collective violence," and having received the taciturn acceptance of his commands in the spirit of "disciplined silence," Benito went to the Senate.

Of late, Benito has been a milk-andwater politician, giving the minimum of offense and overlooking much abuse. In the Senate, however, he became himself, fire-eating, bellicose, pugnacious. He had come to obtain a vote of confidence and bluntly he told the Senators: "If you have confidence in me, say so; if you have not, vote against me and I will bow and go."

But it was clear that Benito meant that he would only quit the Senate and not the Premiership. He let it be known, by an attack on Senator Albertini, Editor of the Corriere della Sera (a Milanese paper which recently reached a daily circulation of one million copies), his bitterest enemy, that he would be uninfluenced by a noisy minority opposition. Affirmed he: "It has been said that I wish to remain in power at all costs. That is not true. I have always bowed to his Majesty the King's powers. If, at the end of this sitting, the King were to tell me to go, I would spring to attention, salute him militarily and go. This I would do if his Majestiy Vittorio Emanuele of

Savoy should tell me to. But when 'his majesty the Corriere della Sera' tells me, then I say 'No.'"

With his head thrown back defiantly,

© Keystone

ALBERTINI

His Majesty the Corriere della Sera!

his white face in startling contrast to his flashing eyes, he declared:

"Don't be led astray by the idea that Fascismo is approaching its end. We may pass through a crisis, we may have some dark moments, but a party like the Fascist Party, which has such a wonderful history of vitality and pugnaciousness, cannot die. If you think it can, you are wrong, and history will prove it to you."

Then, with a change of tone-a tone of kindly exhortation instead of domineering challenge-the Premier enunciated his peroration: "The hour is grave, and you know it. But you will

be equal to the gravity of this moment, because your minds are illuminated by the thought of the King and of the destinies of our country, now and in the future."

The Senate showed confidence in the Premier by 206 to 54 votes. Thirtyfive Senators abstained from voting.

YUGO-SLAVIA

Iron Fist

Premier Pashitch showed once again his formidable "iron fist."

By order of the Government, the three Yugo-Slavian Universities were nationalized. Trouble started when several Croat professors at the Croatian University at Zagreb (Agram) were pensioned off. Students went on strike. A few days later, students of the Ljubliana (Liabach) University

struck. In the capital, at Belgrade University, a strike was also declared. A gun fight ensued between the students and the gendarmes-10 of the former, five of the latter were wounded.

In the western limits of the Kingdom, a mighty shout went up from Croat and Slovene throats, a shout which demanded autonomy and republicanism. But Nikolai Pashitch is over 80 years of age and very deaf.

Affaire de Coeur

The details were hazy; but it was alleged that Anna Ousoupaitais was talking earnestly with Henry Dayton, U. S. Vice Consul at Belgrade, capital of Yugo-Slavia, in the latter's home. The young Vice Consul told Anna that their friendship must cease; Anna remonstrated, but in vain.

The next scene found Anna dead, a bullet hole in her head, and the Vice Consul mortally wounded, three bullets having passed through his neck. Police removed him to the hospital where he later died.

It was first thought that the girl had committed suicide, after shooting her lover, as both her wrists had been cut. Later, Belgrade police avowed themselves mystified.

Going

EGYPT

At Khartum, three officers connected with the recent mutiny in the Sudan (TIME, Dec. 1, 8) were shot by order of a general court-martial. A fourth was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment. In Cairo, as a result of a Zaghlulist petition to the King, dissolution of Parliament was considered certain.

LATIN AMERICA Pershing

Upon the eve of the anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho, Peru's Independence Day, and shortly before the arrival of special U. S. Ambassador and Envoy Extraordinary General John J. Pershing, a revolution broke out in Chota, a town near Cachapoyas.

The revolt was allegedly designed to embarrass President Leguia; but the President is not easily embarrassed. Soldiers put down the uprising ruthlessly, killed 130 of the insurgents, captured many. Execution of the ringleaders followed.

Lima, dressed in gala attire, festooned with myriads of electric lamps, sporting a liberal number of triumphal arches, and holding a jubilant populace, showed not a trace of anxiety over the nugatory revolt. And when Ambassador Pershing arrived, his genial smile was mirrored in the faces of tens of thousands. "December 9th" was celebrated

Invisible Woman*

Is Herbert Quick the
Howells of Middle
America?

The Story. Iowa was no Elysian field about 1890. A third generation still labored to smooth out the social and economic rough-hewing of the first settlers. The graces and sensibilities of the populace were those of thrifty corn-and-cattle men, of boomtown merchants and lawyers and journalists. Politics seethed with hot conflicts between the farmers and the railroads, the people and the state Woman's influpolitical machine. ence was just becoming visible.

A tornado sweeps the story on its way by uprooting pretty Christina Thorkelson from her father's farm and depositing her as a secretary in the law offices of Creede, Silverthorn and Boyd at the county seat of Monterey. Creede is one of the state bosses; working under him Christina learns enough of political mechanics to revolt against them and insert a monkey wrench unexpectedly at the state convention. Oliver Silverthorn, Creede's partner, whom Creede sought to sidetrack in the circuit court, is the beneficiary of Christina's thrust and they marry in the end rather perfunctorily.

Through Christina's life there moves the shadow of her mother's youth. Magnus Thorkelson, Christina's father, married Rowena Fewkes, an ignorant squatter girl, the day after she bore a son to her seducer, Buckner Gowdy, now the millionaire landowner of Monterey County. Christina is keenly sensitive to the stigma of this half brother, Owen Gowdy. But Owen wins his standing in society-and a rich patrimony-by dint of somewhat startling genius for land economics, and the aid of Christina's employers.

a

A residue of comic relief collects about Uncle Surajah Fewkes, who emerges from the poor house into ludicrous wealth via a patented selfopening farm gate.

The Significance. The Invisible Woman completes a trilogy of the Middle West, of which Vandemark's Folly and The Hawkeye were the first two parts. The whole work, no less this third part than the others, verges upon the heroic, as to both quality and proportions.

The Middle West has been chronicled by Hamlin Garland, but not without streaks of sentimentality to blur what might have been the strong lines of his large frescoes. The Middle West has been photographed by the bitter-brilliant young egotist, Sinclair

*THE INVISIBLE WOMAN-Herbert Quick -Bobbs Merrill ($2.00).

Lewis, at close range under a leaden sky; and more mercifully, more delicately, by Willa Cather. Booth Tarkington has written Middle Western idylls, often tinged with gentle parody. has Vachel Lindsay chanted and shouted, Carl Sandburg has mourned and exulted over parts and phases of the Middle West. None of these has ever contrived its epic.

Nor is the epic yet, in Mr. Quick's trilogy. Mr. Quick has something less the building power and much less the veiled iconoclasm of W. D. Howells, New England's classic figure. But of Howells' power for wide and accurate scrutiny, he has enough to warrant a proximate parallel if not an analogy. The Quick trilogy burgeons forth, out of a mind well rooted in human and literary sub-soil, as the richest, most comprehensive fiction that has yet appeared against the Middle Western historical background.

The Author. John Herbert Quick was born to his destiny "near Steamboat Rock, Grundy County, Iowa." After living most of his life in Iowa he is now, at 63, a large-landed resident of West Virginia. His interest and energies-as schoolmaster, lawyer, editor, author-have been intense and abundant, centering chiefly on history, politics and the lot of the farmer.

His public service has ranged from counsel for the Citizens Committee of Sioux City, when he "prosecuted boodlers" in 1894, to membership on the Federal Farm Loan Board (1916) and head of the Far East Red Cross Commission (1920). Besides his fiction, Mr. Quick has written much of a practical nature-on agricultural problems (The Real Trouble With the Farmer), on rural education (The Brown Mouse), on American inland waterways.

Black feelings

THE QUAINT COMPANIONS - Leonard Merrick-Dutton ($2.50).

To find Leonard Merrick treating of miscegenation is something of a shock, like seeing an amiable young lepidopterist drop his butterfly net and go in for heavyweight pugilism.

Elisha Lee was a large black English Negro. His big soft tenor voice made him rich, enabled him to smoke fat cigars, wear silk socks, fur overcoats, diamond rings, roses. But Elisha Lee was lonely, both as animal and artist. He wanted a white woman to love him. And when he obtained pretty Ownie Tremlett for his wife it was only because she could not resist vulgar luxury in the face of frowsy widowhood in Brighton. They soon hated each other bitterly and a weakling mulatto baby was the core of their hate. Lee

drank and died. Ownie reverted to a frowsy lodging house and dyed her hair.

Then the tale begins again with the mulatto weakling, David Lee, in whom the soul of a poet grew. His poem won him the love of a deformed litt country mouse, Hebe, who painted pathetic pictures, wrote him beautifu letters and cowered from his sight for shame of her crumpled body. He cowered from her sight for shame of hi color, and all the more so when she inpulsively sent him a picture of her lovely sister, in place of her own like

More Moore

CONVERSATIONS IN EBURY STREETGeorge Moore Boni, Liveright ($2.50).

From the library edition of his works Mr. George Moore withdrew his book of criticism, Impressions and Opinions. substituted the present volume of conversations "to revive a form in which criticism can be conducted more agreeably than in the essay." To 121 Ebury Street, London, he invites his friends: Walter de la Mare, John Freeman Granville Barker, Edmund Gosse, many others. Graciously, in the candlelight by his comfortable hearth, he spins for them the shining web of his prose. Hardy is damned; Balzac exalted; one learns that the writing of George Eliot is "without pleasure," that boile chicken has never appeared on the table of George Moore, that the Lady of Shalott, is the one poem whereby “poor Tennyson" justifies his existence, that shad, the finest of all fish, has not been eaten in London in the last fifty years "I cannot write," says Mr. Moore. "I have lost my taste for reading; I can only think." Someone recently stated that Mr. Moore had pimples on his soul. That, though not easily demonstrable, may very well be. There are none, however, on his intellect, and he thinks in singularly clear and beautiful English.

TIME, The Weekly News-Magazine. Editors-Briton Hadden and Henry R. Luce. A sociates-Manfred Gottfried (National Af fairs), John S. Martin, Thomas J. C. Martyn (Foreign News). Weekly Contributors-Job Farrar, Willard T. Ingalls, Alexander Klem Peter Mathews, Wells Root, Preston Lock wood, Niven Busch. Published by TIME Inc., H. R. Luce, Pres.; J. S. Martin, Vier Pres.; B. Hadden, Secy-Treas.: 236 E. 39th St., New York City. Subscription rate, ont year, postpaid: In the United States and Mexico, $5.00; in Canada, $5.50; elsewhere. $6.00. For advertising rates address: Robert L. Johnson, Advertising Manager, TIME, 23 E. 39th St., New York City. New England representatives, Sweeney & Price, 127 Federal St., Boston, Mass.; Western representatives Powers & Stone, 38 S. Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill.; Circulation Manager, Roy E. Larsen Vol. IV, No. 24,

The Harem. David Belasco received from the French Government he cross of the Legion of Honor for listinguished contributions to the advancement of Art. A few days later, he produced one of the cheapest plays of his career. The critics wrote vaguely favorable reports, possibly thanks to the Belasco tradition, possibly thanks to the popularity of Lenore Ulric.

The piece is a water-color replica of The Guardsman with strident coloring where subtlety was essential. A husband works busily at his amours through a yellow satin bedroom scene and discovers that the masked lady is his wife. Against a bedroom background that would rouse envy in the heart of Cecil DeMille, Miss Ulric displays extensively what Percy Hammond deftly dubbed her "creamy torso." Details of domestic intimacy are dealt about in handfuls. It is all completely artificial, like a luxuriously frosted cake with tasteless layers. Miss Ulric's playing in a part widely afield from he gamineries of Kiki is as engaging s possible under the thankless circumstances.

Alexander Woolcott-"A perfumed and bawdy farce."

Gilbert W. Gabriel-"About as much delicacy as the Mann Act-farce laid on in broad and loosely-stitched strips."

Close Harmony. Dorothy Parker is known chiefly for her satiric agility in verse (Hate Songs, etc.). Elmer Rice is variously familiar as the author of On Trial and The Adding Machine. Together they have turned out a telling transcript of existence as it is endured in the suburbs.

Ed Graham has a wife whose querulous goodness is an echo of a middleclass marriage which has been running twelve years and needs winding up. Next door lives Belle Sheridan, former chorus girl struggling with a shaky husband. Ed and Belle fall in love through the course of one expertly edited afternoon alone. They are about to run way. At the high point of their adventure, Ed's offensive little daughter is kicked in the stomach by a neighbor's urchin. Ed loses his grip and reenters his domestic temple of despair, psychologically renovated by the crisis. The complacency of small minds is the maddening target against which the play is driven, but poor dramatics often veer the strident arrow of philosophy from its course. Interesting, it may not be popular.

Stark Young-"All compact with parallels and full of grim gaiety, domesticity and dull fates."

Music Box Revue. Down in the dingy dance halls of the Bowery there

lived and made his living a certain waiter. Between trays of beer he stepped to the smoky center of the floor and sang ballads of the day. Some inner impulse set him to fingering the yellow keys of the piano. He manu

IRVING BERLIN

Down in the dingy dance halls—

factured tunes. The strummer-boy era was just opening. He manufactured Alexander's Ragtime Band and put aside his trays of beer. Last winter, he manufactured What'll I Do, to many the most appealing popular song ever written. Last week, he produced The Music Box Revue, called by Alexander Woollcott the greatest he has ever seen. Who is this singing waiter? Who but Irving Berlin?

Detailing a revue is like explaining why the Henderson's dinner was good or bad. There are always the customary courses. In the Music Box, the quality is inevitably excellent, the chefs competent and the distributors expensive. The outcome is this year, as usual, a tidy and entertaining feast.

A scene of waving fans against a black velvet background, an Alice in Wonderland interlude, a live bear, a shift of lights which turns the cast from white to black, the pantomime of a ballet dancer's home, Fannie Brice, Grace Moore, Bobby Clark, Oscar Shaw, Ula Sharon are in the picture.

The music of the erstwhile waiter is the light that lightens it.

Badges. To a nation of puzzleprobers, this ingeniously deceptive combination should obtain an ample hearing. To unweave the plot before your eyes would require several assistants from the circulation department and a committee of subscribers to appear and certify that the narrative implements are without trickery. Therefore let it be said that detectives, stolen bonds, an accused woman, some terrible crooks, shots in the dark and all the rest of the black devices of the melodramatists are in action. Tempered with a fine supply of humor, the proceedings should suffice to interest all but the hardest hearted. Chiefly responsible is the amiably helpless Gregory Kelly. The halting awkwardness, the small cracked voice and all the multiplication of mannerisms he employed in Seventeen are pleasantly in evidence. He plays the graduate of a correspondence school for detectives. Does he find the bonds? Did you ever hear of a correspondence school detective on the stage who didn't?

Percy Hammond-"Another of those trick melodramas with a trick bottom."

Paolo and Francesca. Stephen Phillips, late master of prose and blank-verse, is probably much better beneath the library lamp than he is in the harsh white spotlight of production. This poetic version of the old, old story enlisted the activities of some of the best of our players, was mounted in discerning luxury and presented to the population for special matinees. It dragged.

Old brother Giovanni marries lovely Francesca. Young brother Paolo falls in love with her. With all due tragedy the lovers finally die. Claude King made rather a cardboard character of big brother. Little brother Paolo glowed under the touch of Morgan Farley but never quite caught fire. Phyllis Povah was miscast. Helen Ware as the acid confidant of old brother gave the most complete interpretation.

The Student Prince. A large male chorus swings steins in the air and opens the college drinking chant. The prince in disguise falls in love with a waitress. Excellent voices, elaborate scenery, a seasoning humor and easily audible music are comfortably combined.

The Little Clay Cart. That curious little back alley theatre, the Neighborhood Playhouse, pushed its memor able Grand Street Follies out of the way to do a Hindu play. A Hindu play sounds formidable, clogged with dead bodies floating down the Ganges and that sort of thing. As a matter of fact, most of the CART is comic. There are courtesans and kings, several scenes, no drarnatic pyramiding as we know it.

Rare colorings and scents of strange philosophies mingle swiftly with the laughter. Altogether a shrewd and sensitive experiment.

Princess April. One small and exceptionally amusing young lady, Dorothy Appleby by name; one prima donna of established repute, Tessa Kosta; one chorus that could dance; two or three tunes designed for repetition; and an exceptionally futile book. This is the sum of Princess April. So leaden a liability is this same book, so halting the hilarity, that the production is of doubtful destiny.

Lady, Be Good. When two or three people such as Fred and Adele Astaire and Walter Catlett are gathered together in the name of entertainment, the entertainment must be worthy of the name. Lady, Be Good is very good INDEED. Assisting the leaders is Cliff Edwards, who makes the simple ukelele an instrument of violent versatility, an agile and pictorial chorus, brilliant settings by Normal Bel-Geddes and music by George Gershwin. And, as if this weren't enough, the producers broke nearly all precedent and bought a large stock of new and most amusing jokes. "You're so beautiful," says Mr. Catlett to a certain lady, "that there have been complaints about you."

The Man in Evening Clothes. When a good idea falls to pieces like a human character suddenly crumbling, the spectacle is decidedly distressing. Such was the fate of a good idea in Henry Miller's production. In the first act, the bailiff gave the impecunious count only one suit from all his belongings. He chose his evening clothes and set out to find his fate. Of all the amusing whirligigs of drama that might have come tumbling out of this conception, few were employed.

Cornerstone

Last week, Governor Smith of New York journeyed down the Hudson to Manhattan to lay one of the numerous cornerstones for which the gubernatorial trowel is thought appropriate. It was the cornerstone of a theatre, a new home for the New York Theatre Guild, paid for by the Guild's $500,000 bond issue without the aid of any rich "good fairies." Six years ago, the Theatre Guild consisted only of a few theatre enthusiasts with $500 in cash and a desire to produce plays of a character not ordinarily given a hearing by the commercial managers." Many a movement has had more initial assets, few have had less. In Manhattan, a movement of this kind in dramatics has usually become invisible after six years.

The Theatre Guild grew out of such a movement, to wit, the Washington Square Players, who led a desultory

corporate existence and disbanded at the War's outbreak. Some of the Players came together in 1919, started afresh as the Guild, began producing in the Garrick Theatre. Theatreland cocked its eye at John Ferguson by St. John Ervine, the Guild's second offering; kept the eye cocked when Masefield's The Faithful and Ervine's Jane Clegg appeared the next year; declared that the "art theatre" had achieved new and notable dimensions in the U. S. when the Guild gave Heartbreak House, Mr. Pim Passes By and Liliom among other plays of its third season. With He Who Gets Slapped, Ambush, Back to Methuselah, R.U.R., Peer Gynt, The Adding Machine, The Devil's Disciple, Fata Morgana and still others the Guild continued its conquest of an evergrowing public that looks to it for all that is broadly and deeply discerning in U. S. stage production.

The Guild's Board of Managers, responsible for its choice of plays and general policy, consists of "a banker, a lawyer, an actress, an artist, a producer and a playwright"; that is, in the same order, Maurice Wertheim, Lawrence Langner, Helen Westley, Lee Simonson, Theresa Helburn, and Philip Moeller. Of these, Theresa Helburn, tireless and ubiquitous Executive Director and Mrs. Westley, an accomplished actress of vigorous originality, were the pair chiefly accountable for the birth and rise of the Guild. Finding the theatre "frankly commercial," the Guild has never posed as a society of pure artists.

Some years ago, wealthy, publicspirited Manhattanites sought to create a theatre similar to that which the Guild has become. They called their project the New Theatre and spent much money. The New Theatre has languished, but one of its backers was among those who made speeches over the Guild's cornerstone. This was Otto H. Kahn, Manhattan Mæcenas, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera Co. he of the Guild Theatre: "It is impressive... eloquent . . . that this building was erected not by the munificence of a rich man or the support of the municipality, but by the confidence, the loyalty and the eager interest of those whom you have made your patrons."

CINEMA

The New Pictures

Said

Romola. There was a general readjusting of critical values after the advent of Komola. It began to be admitted publicly, and by great men, that Lillian Gish is the best of all the picture actresses. True, she does not twang the public heart strings as loudly and as often as Gloria Swanson. Yet she has

undoubtedly the most distinguished record of the sisterhood-Birth of a Notion, Broken Blossoms,Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, The White Sister. There are those who say that, with David W. Griffith and Charles Chaplin, she completes the trio of the only true artists of the screen.

The Florence that George Eliot found in Italy and fashioned for her novel Romola has been recaptured by the camera. Amazingly beautiful photog raphy of the strange old sleepy city of the Arno is, next to Miss Gish's playing, the feature of the narrative. Ope ning with a galley-slave ship scene, the escape of the villain, his marriage with the blind Bardi's daughter, his betrayal of her, his denial of his aged father, his death, follow the outline of the story.

Greed. Eric Von Stroheim is the boy that used to do the dirty work, the villain. He acts no more. As a dire tor, he still believes in dirty work Greed is taken for Frank Norris's golddigging story, McTeague, and reck with realism; Von Stroheim relies on recking pictures. He makes an actr pick his nose. Von Stroheim relies c reeking pictures. The No. 1 actor is a brute (Gibson Gowland) married to a grasping wife. The final episode of death in the desert carries a brutal film to a brilliantly brutal climax.

North of 36. Like The Cozerd Wagon, it is a Western story; like Th Covered Wagon, it employs Lois Wilker and Ernest Torrence for two of the leading players. Unlike The Coreti Wagon, it employs cattle instead o prairie schooners; and again, unlike the extraordinary film, it fails notably t mix history and drama in the right pr portions. The play is a saga of the cat tlemen, a panorama of miles of prair where trailed the endless herds of long horns. A villain-you know he is th villain because he shot an Indian gi while she was bathing in the creekin the competent hands of Noah Beer

Circe the Enchantress. Mae Murray has only one point in life after al and that is to wear gowns. Certain she is not an actress. Certainly th story, even if Ibanez did write it spec ially for her, is the worn-out stenci d the wild woman fascinating the solem godly hero. Anyway, Mae Murra wears gowns.

Christine of the Hungry Heart. ! simple story pointing a moral usual gets utterly lost in Hollywood. 7 many tears and a bathing party norl indicate simplicity and the Christine, dealing in sincerity, is an et ception. It argues the old heme of man's work and a man's wife, and much time he should give to each i takes Christine (Florence Vidories husbands to reach her decision,

Jenufa

For the first time in the U. S., ienufa, opera by Leos Janáček, Czecho-Slovakian composer, was given at the Metropolitan. Grand were the persons of the cast; gorgeous the scenery; the music clever, racy, innocent of melody.

In the title rôle was yellow-haired Maria Jeritza; Mmes. Margaret Matzenauer and Kathleen Howard and Messrs. Rudolf Laubenthal and Martin Ohman supported her. A grand house applauded. Critics commended.

Plot. In a Moravian village lived Jenufa, the prettiest girl in the countryside, in whose grey glance lodged witchery. She was loved by Stewa, village stew, and by his brother Laca, an honorable gaffer, who deplored the low-lived ways of Stewa. Without virtue himself, Stewa appropriates Jenufa's. Months go by. She gives birth to a difficulty. Jenufa's stepmother pleads with Stewa. Will he not make Jenufa an Honest Woman? No, he will not, for Laca, in scorn and spite, has slashed Jenufa's cheek with a knife that her beauty may be blemished and his brother find her fair no longer. Stew Stewa falls in love with another lady. Laca calls on the stepmother. He would marry the girl himself, he says, but damme, he cannot stomach the child. Whereupon the stepmother, on a black winter's night, drugs Jenufa, steals out hugger-mugger into the dark and drowns the bastard in an icy brook. On the day of the marriage feast, the ice thaws, peasants discover a disfigured bundle in the sedge. Stepmother is led off to jail, but iron bars make no cage for her. Her daughter is an Honest Woman.

Composer. Leos Janáček composed this opera in 1901. It was first performed in Brünn in 1904; received its first recognition when it was produced in Prague in 1916. Janáček, now a celebrity, abhors saccharine melody in opera.

"Madame Jeritza, in the title rôle, a picture of fresh, rustic loveliness, acted and sang with never-failing variety and vitality" (The New York World). According to The New York Times, her Jenufa is "undoubtedly one of her finest accomplishments."

Janáček, the composer, and Jeritza are compatriots. Jeritza was born and brought up in Brünn, the little town in Czecho-Slovakia where Janáček has spent the greater part of his life. She made her operatic début in Olmütz, from there she went to the Vienna Volksoper (People's Opera) and thence to the Hofoper (Imperial Court Opera). She would have come to the U. S. in 1914, but the War intervened and her Metropolitan début was postponed to

On Christmas day in the morning, bellringers spit on their hands; they catch hold of the ropes that go up into rimed steeples. "Ding dong," goes the first faint and shaken bell; swallows leap out of the belfry. "Ding, dong," peals the carillon, its notes dropping into the air like stones into water.

The poetry of bell effects has always appealed to composers for the piano. In Borodin's Au Couvent, a bell tolls for 18 measures, silvery, gentle, relentless; Debussy composed an intricately sophisticated pattern for bells in his Japanese Temple Gongs; stern bells crash and roll in Tschaikowsky's 1812 Overture; sleigh bells jingle like hard, gay laughter in his Troika (Op. 37, No. 11); bells happily pious tinkle in the Celeste of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt; the profound and icy-hearted Kremlin bell booms in Rachmaninoff's Prelude (Op. 3, No. 2). Many are the other great composers who have written bellmusic.

To play these movements adequately is a difficult technical feat. It requires an attack now crisp as frosty air, now

heavy and lingering to catch the humming overtone of a big bell's voice. On Christmas day, in grey cathedral closes, in the belfries of State Houses, many bells will sound that are too heavy to be swayed by any bellringers, no matter how much they caper or warm their fingers. Biggest of all was the great bell of Moscow, cast around 1734, now used as the dome of a chapel. Other big bells are those of Burma, weight, 260,000 lb.; Peking, 130,000 lb.; House of Parliament, London, 30,000 lb.; Montreal Cathedral, 28,560 lb.; Notre Dame, Paris, 28,672 lb.; St. Peter's, Rome, 18,600 lb.; St. Paul's, London, 11,470 lb.

Verlaine

Paul Verlaine, famed French poet, loved a girl "with a long, pale face, a lisp and a threat of embonpoint." She had, he said, a capacity for incurable grudges. When Verlaine, jugged for drunkenness, lay in prison in Paris in 1870, she brought him a meat pie. He ate, praised. She had always understood, she said, that rats made savoury eating if a man were hungry. Verlaine divorced her.

Long before this untoward incident, he had loved her truly, had written for her a group of deathless love poems, La Bonne Chanson. One of these, a lover's serenade in the dawn, which begins "Avant que tu ne t'en ailles," was set to music 23 years ago by C. M. Loeffler, an Alsatian-American. It was played by the Boston Symphony in 1902, revised, played again by the same orchestra in 1918. Last week, in Manhattan, it was performed by the Philharmonic under the direction of Willem Van Hoogstraten. Once more the marvelously skilful orchestration, the beauty of the music, cold as the fires of Verlaine's "pâle étoile du matin," was lauded by critics.

Szymanowski

In Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave a concert. Leopold Stokowski, a detached and patrician figure with a perfect back, lifted his eyebrows at the audience, his baton at the orchestra. Unrivaled is the popularity of the Philadelphia Orchestra this year; unapproached the position of Conductor Stokowski. Novelty of this concert was the playing, for the first time in the U. S., of a violin concerto by Karol von Szymanowski which the composer dedicated to "mon ami," Violinist Paul Kochanski. Ami Kochanski was there himself, chin on instrument, to play the solo part.

Toti Dal Monte

Last week, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan, Mme. Toti dal Monte, Venetian soprano, made her début. Because of the liberal praise accorded her when, with the Chicago Opera Company, she made her first U. S. appearance a month ago, critics