It is a diverting notion that English tragedy may be the cause of London fogs, and the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens responsible for the English spring. But Mr. Čapek must not be pressed too far on the grounds of what is perhaps not a scientific speculation, especially since he proceeds to another observation of a less questionable sort. Sitting in the editor's English garden on one occasion, he says, 'I realized one great feature of English literature-its absolute Englishness. Indeed, no other literature, except the Russian, is as national as English literature. It is true that we have something to learn from England; it is not, however, their Protestantism, or their golf, or their English cooking, or the English Sunday, but the English passion to live in an English manner and to seek salvation in an English way. That is an example that English literature provides, and that I regard as particularly sound for our national health.'

•

In this same connection, it is interesting to hear of a one-act play on Shakespeare produced in Budapest at the opening of the annual Shakespeare cycle of the National Theatre. Readers of the Living Age will remember that Dr. Hevesi, the director, is a wellknown Shakespearean scholar and translator, and that he produces the plays of the great Englishman not only because of their literary importance but because they infallibly draw well. The present play, entitled The Swan Song, treats of Shakespeare's last hours in Stratford, stifled by the atmosphere of Puritanism that has begun to creep over England. Lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream that he hears recited by a young player in a traveling troupe recall to him his triumphant earlier days, and in a state of some excitement he draws forth a Hamlet costume from a property

trunk, and dies in it after dictating the last lines of The Tempest.

AMERICA AND ART

Ir did not need the news of Mr. Munsey's princely bequest to alarm many art-lovers in Europe at the spectacle of America's gradually accumulating the treasures of the Old World. That news, however, probably acted as the immediate incentive to the introduction into the House of Commons of a bill by Sir Henry Slesser to prohibit the export from the United Kingdom of certain works of art. This bill will apply to buildings as well as to paintings and sculpture. One might suppose that all right-thinking Britishers would agree to this method of combating the menace in question, yet two such distinguished authorities as Sir Joseph Duveen and Sir Flinders Petrie express exactly the opposite opinion in the columns of the Morning Post.

Sir Joseph points out that to permit the sale of landed estates and to prohibit the sale of works of art housed on those estates is as illogical as anything could well be; both possessions are likely to be inheritances from a man's ancestors, and, as the value of the pictures is likely to be the greater of the two, the dictates of genuine patriotism and family feeling would advise their sale. Further, the inflow of American capital that results from this exchange is of inestimable value to British industry, and is not accompanied by any real impoverishment of British galleries. 'Nothing,' concludes Sir Joseph, 'can be more helpful in cementing the friendship of the two nations than this exchange of Romneys, Reynolds, and Gainsboroughs for hard cash.'

This last point is the one Sir Flinders Petrie chiefly dwells on in speaking of the 'carting' of English manor

houses and the like to America; so long as old and unusable buildings are taxed as they now are, he says, their owners will be justified in disposing of them -and without any more evil results, after all, than the acquisition by AngloSaxon Americans of a certain number of fine old examples of British architecture. Sir Charles Holmes, the director of the National Gallery, calls attention in the same paper to the recent purchase in New York of a portrait by John Linnell at the Leverhulme Sale as an indication that American art-collectors are capable of more daring than they have often been credited with. Linnell was a painter of real distinction, and this picture is an excellent one, but in England he has not yet been fully appreciated, and his pictures are a drug on the market.

MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE ON EACH

OTHER

We know what Ben Jonson thought of Shakespeare, whom he 'loved, this side idolatry, as much as any man,' but we have no way of knowing directly what Shakespeare thought of Ben. That judgment would be an entertaining one; and we should be no less happy to have Shakespeare's frank opinion of his older contemporary, Kit Marlowe. The Saturday Review has latterly inaugurated a series of literary competitions set by its editors and regular contributors, of whom Mr. Ivor Brown, the dramatic critic, has been not the least ingenious. He challenged competitors to phrase in a hundred words each or less Shakespeare's opinion of Marlowe, and Marlowe's opinion of Shakespeare. "These opinions are supposed to be expressed in conversation in the absence of the man discussed, and the date imagined is just before Marlowe's death in 1593.'

The winning and the second-prize

entries are printed in a recent Saturday. We lean to the latter on the grounds both of language and of dramatic subtlety. It runs as follows:

Marlowe speaks: —

Young Shakespeare? A forward fellow, but useful, Burbage tells me, in patching of old matter. He'll never go far, but far enough, no doubt, to ape his betters. Has a quick ear for a phrase and a shrewd wit to make it his own, but little skilled in fancy. What I most mislike in the dog is his meanfistedness, every groat saved, shares bought in theatres what manner of poet is this that will turn usurer? A fellow devoid of learning, too. O one of the ruck, I tell you, one of the ruck. . .

Shakespeare speaks:

Master Marlowe counts a bare few months older than I, yet already is the world enriched by him. How fortunate is our age from which so bright a star is risen! How fierce a passion, how tender a sweetness, how dark a tragedy, hath he already mirrored for his generation! Truly, I would the man kept better company, yet must he ever move as a whale among minnows. And which of us may ever hope to rival him in poesy? The name of Marlowe, I tell you, will be writ large in England when all we lie forgot.

THE FRENCH STAGE AGAIN

IF M. Henry Bidou, the literary director of the new Theatre of Young Authors in Paris, may be taken as an authority, the vogue of the light comedy-which M. William Speth bewailed in an article recently quoted here is doomed, and the French stage is on the verge of an era in which tragedy will resume a rôle of great importance. The Theatre of Young Authors was founded last year by a group of fifty-two playwrights, some well known, some obscure, for the sake of making possible the production of plays by young writers whom commer

NOT since the theft of the 'Mona Lisa' from the Louvre has so singular a crime been committed in the museum world as the recent theft of four Constable landscapes from the Royal Academy in London. And the freakishness of the crime was enhanced by the anonymous return of three of the four pictures to the editorial offices of the Daily Mail-which had given the affair considerable publicity. 'Picture-stealing in this manner almost ranks as a fine art,' comments the Times. 'Here was no bungling, but a swift and confident abduction of the coveted objects.' The boldness of the crime suggests the professional criminal, but its character makes such an explanation unlikely. "The psychoanalyst,' observes the Westminster Gazette, 'is probably better qualified than Scotland Yard to suggest a convincing motive. At all events, the hand of the professional thief is scarcely to be looked for here, for stolen pictures are highly dangerous contraband and more difficult to dispose of profitably than almost anything else.'

A CONCRETE CHURCH

THE possibilities of such modern building-materials as concrete for other than merely utilitarian purposes have

been brilliantly illustrated by the architects of a church in Le Raincy, an outlying suburb of Paris. According to pictures of the exterior and interior of this church in the Manchester Guardian, it achieves a genuinely fresh type of architectural beauty without more than a suggestion of grotesqueness. Its outlines are roughly reminiscent of those of a Gothic building, but a second glance reveals how far the construction is from being strictly Gothic and how freely the detail has been allowed to deviate from that norm. High vertical pillars, ribbing at the corners the square stages of the spire, are the most conspicuous feature of the exterior, and the interior is made memorable by the vast amount of wall-space occupied by glass - an effect made possible by the basic material itself.

A POET AND A MOUNTAIN-TOP

A REAL mountain-topA REAL mountain-top-a peaked and snowy one, not a mere metaphorical eminence. At last Gabriele d'Annunzio is to have a piece of personal property worthy of him, if he accepts the offer of Prince Hermann of Schönburg-Waldenburg, who wants to give him the peak of Monte Nevoso in the province of Carnaro, where his estates are situated. The Prince, according to the Morning Post, is one of the most conspicuous figures among those who have taken Italian citizenship since the annexation of the new provinces, and a great admirer, not unnaturally, of the chauvinist poet. The Rome correspondent of the Post does not say to what purpose Signor d'Annunzio will be expected to put his somewhat lonely freehold, but a name that rimes with glorioso, maestoso, and pomposo should prove useful in itself.

Die Neuentstehende Welt, by Hermann Graf Keyserling. Darmstadt: Verlag O. Reichl.

[Neue Freie Presse]

COUNT KEYSERLING's recently published little volume is worth being read by everybody. Here one may really find that constantly demanded 'standpoint beyond the sects' that is neither a flight from reality nor a compromise. Keyserling shows things as they are, not, as so many novelists do, in an impressionistic way, but in order to achieve the expression of a philosophy, — and I cannot see on what grounds the picture he draws can be attacked. Whether the world he describes pleases you or terrifies you, whether you look upon it optimistically as a necessary transition or pessimistically as a collapse, depends of course on your individual attitude.

I shall not attempt to convince the reader of the exceptional importance of this book by using stale superlatives. I hope I have said enough to prove that at the very least it will show him where he stands in the 'newly emerging world,' and whether he belongs with the 'chauffeurs' [Keyserling's term for the technically-minded moderns], with the romantics, or with the forerunners of a new thought-movement which, if it becomes a reality, as a result of its intellectual infectiousness, will take in all mankind.

Last Essays, by Joseph Conrad. London: J. M. Dent and Sons; Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company. $2.00.

[Manchester Guardian]

MOST of the twenty essays included in this volume were written after the publication of Notes on Life and Letters in 1921, and Mr. Richard Curle, who edits them, believes that the book completes the publication of such of Conrad's miscellaneous writing as is worth preserving. These essays, mostly recovered from the files of the press, deal with a wide range of subjects, but there has been no ransacking of a dead man's papers to find scraps with which to pad out a book. They are all well worth their place. Five, which Mr. Curle has grouped together, were, he thinks, to have formed the nucleus for a pendant volume to the Mirror of the Sea. They are filled with the same finely reflective reminiscence of

great ships and of great souls in far places that marked the earlier volume. They include a long essay, written in 1924, on the fascination the old explorers had for Conrad, and the delightfully whimsical championship, after crossing the Atlantic in the Tuscania in 1923, of the older, sterner, simpler life of the sailing ship.

Two essays with the war at sea as their background follow - ‘The Unlighted Coast,' written for the Admiralty after a ten days' cruise in the Ready in 1917, and 'The Dover Patrol.' A charming paper on 'Travel,' written as a preface to Mr. Curle's book, Into the East, well deserves inclusion. And one feels that Conrad himself would have wished that the two essays on his friend Stephen Crane should find a place. They reveal, in their intimate and affectionate account of the friendship, so much of Conrad himself that they are especially welcome. The most considerable of the other essays- a review of Galsworthy's The Man of Property — gives fine proof of that wide and subtle understanding of letters on which Conrad's own art was based. In the main the volume, unlike many postscripts, is of durable stuff that can take its place as an integral part of Conrad's work.

The Hounds of Spring, by Sylvia Thompson. London: William Heinemann; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. (An Atlantic Monthly Publication.) $2.00.

[Times Literary Supplement]

IN The Hounds of Spring Miss Sylvia Thompson adds one more to the many novels that present the Great War as an unqualified though unavoidable disaster; and there is happily a touch of individual distinction in her handling of the subject. Nor has she fallen into the common error of subordinating her characters to her theme; for Colin Russell, Zina and Wendy Renner, Hope Chase, and the few other principals, exist in their own right, not merely as the illustrations of an argument. She is justified in believing that these people are, to quote the words of her preface, 'in their infinitesimal way the human atoms which, fused by Events, go to make that subtle mass of stuff that solidifies into History.' They are, in brief, at once typical and personal; and to have made them so is an achievement that inclines one to forgive minor faults

formal untidiness and disregard of economy due to inexperience.

Zina is the lovely daughter of Sir Edgar Renner, a naturalized Englishman of Austrian birth; and Colin Russell is a young man fresh from Oxford to whom she is engaged to be married. She herself, when we first meet her, has not yet emerged from dreaming girlhood; she is intoxicated with life and with her lover, and when the war breaks out and he enlists she cannot for a long time realize the magnitude of the horror that has befallen. It is brought home to her finally in the obvious way; but Miss Thompson succeeds in investing the obvious with significance. When Colin is reported 'Missing, believed killed,' Zina takes a tragic leap into maturity. 'How very queer,' she remarks, frigidly selfcontrolled; and her heart hardens against life. In this state of petrification she remains for two years; and then, in a spirit of carelessness, tinged faintly with a sensuality born of boredom and despair, she accepts in marriage an obtuse middle-aged divorcé. Whereupon Colin, perhaps a little too promptly, reappears on the scene, having by now recovered from his shell-shock and the resultant loss of memory. To summarize the plot further would do Miss Thompson an injustice, for no summary could give an adequate idea of the freshness of treatment which she brings to an oft-told story.

The Letters of Maurice Hewlett, edited by Laurence Binyon. London: Methuen. 188.

[Observer]

HEWLETT needed only a friend in the Antipodes to be a letter-writer of the first rank. He had a vigorous personality and a still more vigorous method of expressing it; moreover, his interests never simmered, but boiled over, and sometimes away. The bulk of this collection is composed of brief notes scribbled to friends whom he expected to meet again in a few days. But in every page, every line, is the real Hewlett tang, strong and sweet. If he thinks of a joke he shoves it in, and if he is unhappy he says so, and otherwise he keeps to business. Indeed, the letters seem not so much written as shouted to somebody in the next room. He does not begin: 'On many points I do not seem entirely to have made clear my attitude toward this vexed question.' He begins: 'Before God you do me foul wrong. There's no controversy about anything.' And

when his son is missing in December 1914, his letters to his friends, acknowledging their sympathy and communicating his anxiety, are magnificently undramatic. He ranted for a jest, but he ensued truth,

What comes out very plain is the existence beneath florid phrases and luxuriant fantasy of a curiously ascetic idealism. 'Nothing outside the world of sensation and experience interests me at all,' he writes, 'except the unceasing effort of men to get outside it.' The exception grew more and more important with the years. It was a laughing cavalier who wrote The Forest Lovers, and found fun in the repute and money brought thereby. The Hewlett who at over sixty moves into a cottage and starts reviewing, as being, after all, a more honest craft than writing secondrate fiction, reminds us of his Puritan ancestry. What began with the romanticism of appearances ended with the romanticism of the spirit.

Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh: 1879-1922. Edited by Lady Raleigh. 2 vols. London: Methuen; New York: The Macmillan Company. $7.00.

[Morning Post]

a

How many men are there whose collected letters — unpremeditated effusions addressed to relatives and friends would fill two stout volumes, and make matter as lively and entertaining for the general reader as it was for the fortunate few to whom it was addressed? Until these Letters of the late Sir Walter Raleigh were published, even those who knew him best could not measure the full worth and extent of his contribution to literature. They take precedence even of his Milton and his Shakespeare, for they are a creation, albeit written by a critic in the course of criticism. They present a personalityrare and lovable spirit, whose essential humanity could not be hidden by any professor's cap and gown. For the most part, private letters are too loaded with transient, personal things to have any interest beyond the home and the circle for which they were intended. But these Raleigh letters, though they extend over a period of more than forty years, are all alive in every line. They breathe zest; there is no dead stuff anywhere. Whatever they touch on, they kindle into interest and significance; and even when they express serious literary criticisms, they do it with the spontaneous, informal vigor of one who flings his meaning into words.