August 25, 1924

TIME

think great strides have been made toward giving Spain a clean Government. There is no intention of superseding Primo de Rivera; on the contrary, I am sure that the Dictator will remain in power until conditions have been made safe for the return of parliamentary government, and I think this will take at least another year.

"The Government is making great progress toward rooting out governmental graft, including padded payrolls. As an example of what has been accomplished, look at the budget of the city of Valencia, which has had a deficit of 2,000,000 pesetas. Without curtailing the public service, this has been converted into a favorable balance of 1,000,000 pesetas. The Government has gone ahead with the good roads program and the extension of the common-school system.

"But the big job of the new régime is to give clean government to Spain, and from what I have heard from the people, I feel confident that Primo de Rivera has popular approval. I may say that it is wrong to call the General a Dictator, since Spain is really being run by a directorate of ten men, and not by one man."

As was truly remarked, the King is unafraid of his enemies, who represent the throne as crumbling.

Tomb News

That intractable foe of the Spanish ruling house (Prof. Don Miguel Unamuno) recently wrote: "The Moroccan debacle will be the tomb of the Habsburg-Bourbon dynasty, in Spain and the tomb of the monarchy."

The past week's news from the "tomb" was as dismal for Spain as might well be expected. Not long Director Primo ago, Rivera, as he must now be called, withdrew several thousands of Spanish troops from Spanish Morocco. With the aid of the famed Moorish Chieftain, Raisuli, with whom Primo is now on excellent terms, a non-aggressive policy toward the Moorish rebels was adopted. The rebels were, however, quick to take advantage of the new order.

During the past week, the rebel forces attacked the Spanish positions, won many victories, captured several villages. Spanish native troops and those under Raisuli deserted in large numbers to the enemy. The Spanish Primo had, position was serious. perforce, to rush several battalions from Spain to the "tomb."

RUSSIA

The British Commonwealth of Nations is "in for it," to use a colloquialism, if Grigori Zinoviev, fierce Bolshevik spirit, is to be believed. Said he in Moscow: "England is now the chief task of the Communist International. If we succeed in creating a mass Communist party there, half the European victory will have been achieved. We must not set too low a value on what is going on in England. We must organize a daily Communist paper and create a left flank of trades unions. We must set to work in the British colonies."

In that turbulent country ruled over by Amir Amanullah Khan, was sentenced to death an Italian engineer. He became implicated in a brawl in Kabul, the capital. The The enpolice tried to arrest him. gineer defied them. The police persisted. The engineer shot, killed a Bobby. Finally, the engineer surrendered, was tried, was condemned to death.

Although attempts were being made to patch the matter up by payment of "blood money", in accordance with a tribal custom, members of the Italian colony became irate, declared that the engineer had not had a fair trial. Some of them became disgusted, left the country.

Eastern Capital, was Tokyo, rocked 15 times by the heaving General breasts of mother Earth. alarms were sounded; people fled to the wide, open spaces. There were no casualties; little damage to property was sustained.

LATIN AMERICA "Menocal or Death"

Gen. Menocal,* onetime President of Cuba, was nominated by the Conservative Party for the Presidency in opposition to President Zayas, whose partisans were urging him to stand for a second term of office.

or

Excitement was high. The Conservatives, with iron resolution, adopted the slogan "Menocal Death" but failed to specify who was to die. Presumably it was their

*Maria Garcia Menocal, Cuban-born (1867), was educated in the U. S. at Cornell University, was admitted to Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity (strong nationally and strong at Cornell). During the Spanish-American War he functioned as a fiery guerilla leader. Then he turned his attention to the Cuban-American Sugar Co.. took charge of the largest sugar estate on the island. In 1912, he was elected President of Cuba on the Conservative ticket. "Unemotional, He was reelected in 1916. quiet, determined, honest, economical, friendly to the U. S.," say friends of Menocal.

enemies, since they were reported to have arranged to keep all delegates within range of "sawed-off shotguns" in case any of the latter should try to suspend the Convention.

Mexican Discord

On one sultry August afternoon, the denizens of Mexico City were startled by the clatter of horses and the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet. With curious eyes, they watched detachments of police, armed with shining Mauser rifles, surround Congressional Hall.

un

Inside the building, there sat, as the Electoral Congress, the Permanent Commission and the Deputies opposed at the last election (TIME, July 21). They were there to examine the credentials of the newly-elected Deputies.

The parade of armed force was necessary, according to the civil and military authorities, because of much high feeling between the adherents of President-elect Gen. P. Elias Calles and those of Gen. Angel Flores on the one hand; between the Agrarians and Laborites, both supporters of Gen. Calles, on the other.

The Floristas admitted that they were beaten in the polling, but charged that the Callistas had broken ballot boxes and prevented them from voting. There was a possibility, it was said, that the Floristas might form a small Chamber of Deputies of their own for the purpose of calling upon President Obregon and upon the public for fair play in the matter of selections by the Electoral Congress.

The trouble between the Agrarians and the Laborites was that they were both trying to put their own candidates into office, both claiming the honor of having made the election of Calles possible. This factionalism split the Callistas and gave rise to expectations of riotous demonstrations.

Brazilian Rumors

The Brazilian Federals crushed the revolt which recently raged around Sao Paulo (TIME, July 14, et seq).

The revolt spread to the State of Amazonas. A state of siege was declared.

Federals cleared the State of Paraná of rebels.

Rebels retreating from the State of Sao Paulo smashed water tanks to hinder pursuit.

Casualties in the recent siege of Sao Paulo were officially numbered at 1,106.

MUSIC

A New Metropolitan?

The Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan, is at least realizing what is self-evident to every visitor from Toledo and Akron: that the structure which now houses the "greatest opera company in the world" is woefully inadequate a small, dingy, undistinguished, badly-located building. Otto

O. H. KAHN

He'll talk to the other directors

H. Kahn, khan of music-patrons, said as much. "The Metropolitan is antiquated. It has no room for the thousands who cannot pay high prices of admission. It is in a congested district of the city. We should have a modern, more beautiful, more commodious structure, located in another section. . . . Will we ever get or build a new Metropolitan? . . . Well, I'll talk to the other Directors about it."

Strike

The musicians who toot and twiddle in Chicago's theatres are now paid salaries which range from $57.50 to $87.75 per week. Seven hundred of them, the musical personnel of 35 theatres, have decided that this is not enough money. They want an increase of 10%. Through their union, they demanded the boost. The

theatre owners proposed a compromise on a 5% raise. The musicians shook their heads, issued an ultimatum, stood pat, scheduled a strike to begin on Labor Day unless their demands are met in full.

Sistine Again

Last year the Sistine Choir, sweet singers of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, turned their faces west from the Holy City, traversed the Ocean's watery floor, came to sing their lauds and hallowed canticles in the U. S. The tour, as everyone knows, was financially a success, artistically a triumph. This season the Sistine Choir will again visit the U. S. Among those who will be heard

are:

Luigi Golinelli, giant white-haired basso, whose locks are snowier than the fleeces of Sharon, whose voice could shake the walls of Gaza; Spartaco Morgia, dramatic tenor, with barrel chest and amber voice-a man like a hogshead of honey; Attilio Boschi, young baritone, who, it is declared, is destined to be "the second Scandiani"; the Rev. Antonio Grimaldi, basso at the Sistine Chapel for 16 years, a famed authority on ecclesiastical music; Eugenio Andriselli, adult male soprano and assistant organist at St. Peter's. In all, there are twelve singers. Their programs will include selections from the religious music of the sedate Palestrina, operatic numbers and folk-melodies of Southern Italy which, it is said, have never before been heard in the U. S.

St. Louis & Atlanta

St. Louis has recently become the scene of a successful musical experiment. In a cup-shaped auditorium seating 10,000, opera, grand or comic, has been given nightly. The principal singers and comedians are imported; the choruses are local talent-St. Louis boys and maidens, trained throughout the Winter months. Velvet Summer twilights in St. Louis thrill to the strains of Verdi, Mascagni, Gilbert and Sullivan; the moon, that vision of still music in the sky, looks down upon declamatory stars in tinsel and brocade.

Atlanta sent a scout, one C. B. Bidwell, over to find how it was done. On the first evening of his visit, rain deluged the city at seven o'clock. At eight, he went to the auditorium, found 5,000 people there, heard the light opera The Lilac Domino finely performed. The scout returned to Atlanta and reported to his chief, Asa G. Candler, Coca-Cola man. The latter was astounded by the revelations he received

Now he has announced that in future Summers the citizens of Atlanta are to be an open-air auditorium, to hold mony as the inhabitants of St. Louis. A municipal opera is planned, with imported stars, local choruses; there is to be an open-air auditorium, to hold 8,000.

In Paris

Deems Taylor, clever American music-maker, has written a score for the cinema (TIME, Aug. 4). The innovation has been duplicated in France; Darius Milhaud, one of the leaders of Paris's younger set of tonal wits, has composed the musical accompaniment to the new picture L'Inhumaine, which features Mme. Georgette Leblanc.

Darius has defended his new venture as follows: "The cinema interests the musician through its rhythmic life, full of an intensity and a complexity, which in the picture L'Inhumaine becomes mysterious and spiritual. The poetry of machines is effectively interpreted through fantasy and an absolutely new technique. Much research and work has made this film the achievement of a poet. It is an artistic effort which has, at last, been realized; and the cinema becomes, as Jean Cocteau says, 'the tenth muse'."

Several streets in Paris have been renamed, two of them after composers. Rue Henri-Martin has become Rue Massenet; Rue St. Charles is now Rue Saint-Saëns.

Music, Cigars, Woolworth

A great "temple of art," having been sold to a cigar store corporation, will eventually be turned into a five-and-tencent store. Aeolian Hall, Manhattan, bought two weeks ago by the Schulte Cigar Stores for $6,000,000 (TIME, Aug. 11), has been leased to the Woolworth Co. for a term of 63 years. Says the official announcement:

"The ground floor (the present concert hall), which will be occupied by the Woolworth Co., will probably represent the most important store in their large chain of approximately 1,350 fiveand-ten-cent stores, including stores in England and Canada. The deal emphasizes the tremendous growth of this company, which started about 40 years ago with one small store at Lancaster, Pa."

The structure will probably be retained by the Aeolian Co. until May 1, 1929, on which date cigarettes and cheap cutlery will oust Art from the premises. Meanwhile, five more seasons of concerts will be heard inside the 43rd Street entrance, and for five years talking machines, radio apparatus and electric pianos will be sold from

the 42nd Street side. Then the fiveand-ten will raise its scarlet standard, and the tobacco company will begin to profit on its $6,000,000 outlay.

Woolworth will pay a rental of $400,000 a year for the first 21 years. A graduated rental scale has been arranged for the second and last periods. These three periods have doubtless been fixed to correspond to Beethoven's famous "three periods," out of respect for the composer's shade, which undoubtedly haunts the hall. The rent for the entire 63 years, will amount to the neat little sum of $27,500,000. In addition, the tenant has agreed to pay taxes, insurance and running expenses.

"Mash Mash Mash"

An earthenware tablet, long buried in the Middle Eastern section of the Prussian State Museum, has been found to contain the musical notation for a religious hymn. This notation has been deciphered by Dr. Kurt Sachs, Curator of the Collection of Instruments at the Berlin High School for Music. The tablet comes from ancient Assur, capital of Assyria, and was inscribed in cuneiform characters about the year 800 B. C. It contains three columns: The first is the mysterious music; the second, in archaic Sumerian, an account of the creation of Man from the blood of the gods; the third, a translation of this into Assyrian.

Prof. Sachs first figured out what the ancient notes were called. Here are the first four lines he deciphered: ME ME KUR KUR A A A A A

KU KU LU LU

MASH MASH MASH MASH

Finally, he discovered the modern musical equivalent of each of these syllables. He concluded that the Assyrians, like the Chinese, had a scale consisting of five different notes, giving much the same effect as that which is produced when one plays on only the black keys of a piano. The tune of this particular hymn turned out to be rather "Chinese" in character, monotonous and plaintive. It was played on a harp which had 21 strings and was probably very popular with the old priests and cutthroats of Assyria.

CINEMA

The New Pictures

Empty Hands. Readers of the novel by Arthur Stringer, from which this film was fashioned, hold that its chief interest lies in the development of the devices by which the man and the woman existed and finally made themselves comfortable in a hidden wilderness. When they arrived, via a gorge of rapids, the woman had no standard equipment at all (her bathing suit had been torn off by the torrent's claws) and the man had only a coat, trousers, undershirt and a hunting knife. Before the rescue, a good many weeks later, they were living in a log bungalow with a full line of cooking utensils, clothes and toilet articles. Manufacture of these things did not interest the producers (quite properly). They were forced for reasons of dramatic necessity to stress the wickedness of the young lady (Norma Shearer) before she reached the purifying atmosphere of loneliness. Indeed, if her mother's ghost had not walked at just the right moment, she might have run off with a married man. Instead, her father whisked her away to the open spaces, where a heartily disapproving young engineer (Jack Holt) went to her rescue down the rapids. The opening phases of the film are struck off with the old rubber stamp. There was even the midnight bathing-party, at which everyone got drunk and hurled the fat guest into the pool for comedy. But comedy ceased when the man and the woman were hurled into the canyon rapids. From that point forth, the adventure gained in entertainment values.

Fools in the Dark. Every now and then some producer reaches the absolute end of his dramatic rope and decides to make a melodrama on the theory that old things are best. Accordingly, he stirs up daggers, skeletons, an avalanche, death traps, mystery yachts, a Hindu villain, an airplane rescue. In the present instance, a death ray was included to give that natty modern touch. No matter how often you have been to the cinemas, the incoherent multitude of these manufactured thrills serves a sure purpose. There is an inevitable, if factitious, reaction. Matt Moore and Patsy Ruth Miller assist materially in making the discerning spectators feel like fools in the dark for enjoying such arrant debris.

Africrescendo*

Mr. Powys as a Mr Jumbo Brum

This book takes no

no plot to give it

.nel

mbo

text; it employs body, no characters

to give it blood is the cont and spirit. Its subject strangene ..nent of Africa; and its ss proves once more the truth .. ancient apothegm concerning uth and fiction. Written in the manner of a novel and cast in the pattern of a travelogue, it belongs to that obscure hinterland of literature that W. H. Hudson visited in Green Mansions and Defoe, to a certain extent, in Robinson Crusoe.

Africa is a harsh nursery for receptive natures. The author had to reccncile his to the task of keeping in order some sheep and some natives-a task which included counting, shearing, ear-marking, castrating the former; humoring, doctoring, whipping, burying the latter. This was itself taxing for a young and literary Englishman-a Beau Brummel in khaki pants and red shirt, exiled from home because of ill-health. There were compensating novelties. For instance, on the night of his arrival he lay shivering through the white hours in a disused woodshed while a lion drank from a reservoir outside his door; later, he put down a native riot, shot a hippopotamus, trapped a lion, was hoodooed by a witch-doctor, barely escaped trampled by a herd of wild elephants.

being

At another time Mr. Powys had accused an African "Man of God" of stealing goats and had been heartily cursed in return. That night, as he lay in the dark, he heard a ghastly laugh, he writes, "long and loud, whining and wailing up from the forest, up from the gully, so I judged. I tried to reassure myself. Surely it was the howl of a hyena feasting on the remains of the dead buck? But even as my mind was suggesting this, my subconscious self knew that it lied. That criminal human outcry, it could issue from no animal throat. Somewhere out where the hispid branches swayed, I know there was man with white canine teeth giving vent to BLACK LAUGHTER! . . . A long time passed... then gradually I began to realize that the room had become filled with an extraordinary odor, an odor of putrifying blood and rotting flesh, the odor and breath of a hyena." When day comes he looks out and "stamped in the dust of the threshold, two indents-one the footprint of a man; and the other the padded 'dog's spoor of an erect hyena. I knelt and

a

sees

*BLACK LAUGHTER-Llewelyn Powys-Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

examined them both closely. There was no mistake about it. One foot was a foot with toes; the other a foot with claws!"

Such experiences as this have a novel ring, but they are not totally unfa

AUTHOR POWYS

Now he lives in New York

nfiliar; others have undergone them, written about them, cinematized them. The difference between these people and Mr. Powys lies in the fact that the latter is an artist. His book is informed with the spirit of Africa as with a sensible presence, is haunted with the shadow of that jungle in whose twilight incredible beasts wage their truceless wars and come down by night to drink from the river-pools under the swinging constellations of the Cross-constellations that see, here and there, man's fugitive campfires, how dwarfed in that illimitable waste! Reading, one can almost detect an odor, acrid, animal, exciting-the smell of Africa.

The Significance. It is in this quality of primitive reality that the book is original and profound. Questions are always being subtly provoked that are easy enough to answer at a dinner table within hearing of a hotel orchestra-not so easy when one can catch far off, as it were, the challenge of the ageless cataracts of life and death thundering forever in the dark places of the world. In one passage, Mr. Powys recounts talking with a Kikuyu who asked him solemnly if he were aware that elephants had once serious been "He looked so

men:

when he asked the question that, on my soul, I was half inclined to believe him. I tell you in that darkening forest with the rustling of the tropical leaves about me and the indefinable stir of the oncoming night audible everywhere, it seemed more than possible that I was about to hear the authentic story of the origin of man." This may serve to illustrate, in a small measure, the eerie quality of a book that bids fair to do what W. H. Hudson's work has done for South America-include another Continent in the Empire of English Letters.

The Author. In 1914, Llewelyn Powys went to Africa, where his brother had a farm, to avoid dying of consumption in England. He returned in 1920, published Ebony and Ivory. which won him instant recognition. Now he lives in New York.

Africalamity*

Brave, boyish Janet Rawley and her brutishly neurasthenic spouse, Jack, are about to plunge into African shrubbery on a safari for game and gold. Capt. James Antrim, of the King's African Rifles, splendid fellow that he is, cannot bear to see such ill-mated tenderfeet wandering loose among the lions, thirst and lone liness. He turns in his steamer ticket from Mombasa to England, takes command for and of the Rawleys, gets the safari past the usual vile German agent and as far as a highland camp, three weeks from nowhere. Here fever, whiskey, manslaughter, flies and love descend upon them. Rawley indulges in the first three and then loses his unpleasant self in the ample countryside. Janet and Antrim stagger home black-lipped and full of British guilt After the decent British interval, they marry. A ghostly negroid smell haunts them nightly, requiring Antrim's re turn to Africa to lay the ghost of Dingaan, a black he sent to find the strayed Rawley. Two skeletons come to light in an abandoned game-pit clearing Dingaan of a murder he might pardonably have committeed.

Mr. Young's African smells, sights and sounds are indubitable. He can o casionally strike off action, too. motivation, however, is vague, un countable, spasmodic. His emoticon plod in circles. His temper the ge erous will call wholesome and dignitie others cold and muttonish.

*WOODSMOKE-Francis Brett Young-D

ton ($2.00).

Grindell-Mathews

What Use to Write Books, Poems?

play

Zona Gale, novelist, poet, wright, always comes to my mind when i discussion of pacificism arises, because the accomplishment of World Peace with her is so impassioned a grusade. She is the sort of person who does not eat meat or wear furs because she believes it is wrong to kill animals for the luxury of mankind. I should like to have her meet Prof. Grindell-Matthews, famed inventor of the death-ray (TIME, Apr. 21, SCIENCE) as I met him the other morning, and to see the motion picture of his experiments. What would she have to say to him, I wonder; for he is a quiet, shy, slight Englishman, just as shy and is quiet as is she, and he claims to be i devout advocate of World Peace, advocating fighting war with its own instruments. Yet when I had seen two reels of his dreams, there seemed nothg to say. He went out of the room, and none of the newspaper people who ad chanced to see the picture spoke to im. There was absolutely nothing to

ay.

A beam of light shoots from a proector. It seeks out a mouse in its age. The mouse blinks, surprised, ino the glow. A switch is turned. Terible energy flies along the beam. The nouse jumps into the air, quivers, is lead. So, in the future, Prof. Grindellilm such prophetic visions-the death ay will sweep whole armies into obivion, whole cities into bleak, smolderng ruins, explode bombs in mid-air, low up ammunition dumps from great listances; in a word, make existence for those who do not possess its myserious secret impossible, and, so he ays, end war.

This is a dream worthy of H. G. Wells; but too long thinking about it will send anyone of imagination into a mood of depression. What use is writing books, or poems, or discussing them, when radios bring the human voice and human events themselves into the back parlor of the remote farmhouse, when the motion picture offers more of a thrill to the simple mind than any written romance ever could? What time will anyone have for reading?

Ah, well, what I saw the other morning was, after all, only a shy little Englishman trying to put across an invention, just as scared, doubtless, as the youngest ingénue trying out her first speaking line on Broadway. The human comedy is just as amusing, just as pathetic, just as worth playing and writing as ever; and Death, whether by death-ray or automobile accident, just as cruel, kind and inevitable as everjust as inevitable as bad novels and good novels coming in a steady stream across my desk. J. F.

New Plays

Dancing Mothers.-The first play of the season will irritate a lot of people considerably owing to its insistent cheapness and will impress them none the less by its aggressive drama and abnormal ending.

For two acts, the people act just about as all people act in the first two acts of a flapper comedy. The daughter of the

HELEN HAYES

Her moral passages were clogged

house enters carrying a high alcoholic content acquired at a Manhattan bachThe father of the elor's apartment. house philanders with females of whom his wife, up to the time her good friend Mrs. Mazareen tells her about it for her own good, knows little. Thereupon the wife lights a cigarette and starts out to plug the domestic puncture by proving that she can be the gayest of the household.

In the process, she unfortunately falls in love with the svelt bachelor who has been clogging her daughter's moral passages with cocktails. The bachelor is further complicated by a somewhat inexpensive lady, who is also tangled into the husband's past. The whole combination assembles and there follow two acts.

Helen Hayes is, curiously enough, the featured player, although the play obviously belongs to the mother part. Mary Young accounted for the latter with flashes of distinction. To the cast and the twisted ending (the dancing mother marries the bachelor), the play owes its claims to serious attention.

The New York Telegram and Evening Mail-"It trips the light satiricand slows down to a grand march away from Home,, Sweet Home."

The Sun-"One of those recurrent

comedies written in a state of considerable agitation over the way folks are carrying on these days."

Easy Street. This particular wife started dying at an early age because, after she told her grandfather that she had sat on his silk hat, he spanked her. One thing led to another and by the second year of her married life she was telling her husband she had been home all day when she really had been to Manhattan and that hats cost eight dollars when they really cost twenty. The husband was stupid but he finally caught up with the parade of prevarications. Thereupon he produced a pistol and waved it around for the better part of an act until he had separately threatened everyone in the cast and all but the upper boxes in the audience. Ralph Kellard, as the husband, brought to this part as full an assortment of plain and fancy sound and fury as it is the misfortune of most witnesses to recall. Finally he did not shoot any one at all and took the wife back to their little paradise-on-the-installment-plan, because he could not order ice and milk. She was a good woman. And had she been as sensible as she was good she would have fanned him with a short, blunt instrument and gone off to live with the other man.

The New York Herald-Tribune"Abounding in banalities and bromides." The Sun-"One of those forlorn, home-made pieces which the powers behind the American theatre feel it best we should see and dispose of early in every season."

Marjorie. When Andrew Tombes comes to town in a new musical show, it is an occasion for bonfires and public dancing in the streets. Suspicion has been growing of late that he is one of the Big Ten comedians. In Marjorie, Mr. Tombes is not endowed with any such happy material as his famous cinema burlesque in the "Follies," but there is much, none the less, to be thankful for. He plays the press agent of a famed actor and rewrites a "sap's" play because he loves the sister. The sap and the sister were played by Skeet Gallagher and Elizabeth Hines, respectively. Mr. Gallagher (no, it's a different one) plays a smooth blond part with a certain amount of contributory laughter. Miss Hines is as gracefully