used in construction is of a bright red color, and is decorated with choice carvings that never destroy the general line-effect. The room itself could hold the spectators for a whole day without any drama. How far from the Chinese theatre!

Here too, however, the rôles are entirely taken by men. From the earliest times the Chinese have been the teachers of Japan, and in the Japanese theatre, therefore, there is always a reminiscence of the Ming period. But with what a difference! The actors speak in their natural bass or tenor voices, even when they play feminine rôles. All the players on the stage are unmistakably men. Frequently, to be sure, even to-day, their manner is governed by their superhuman samurai ideal, but in every other respect they are no more remote from bustling reality than our own Wilhelm Tell. They play in the full glare of an indescribably bright and colored light, which makes an impression of strangeness on a Westerner, but is natural enough to the happy inhabitants of a sunny country.

Even the Japanese theatre does not make room for the purely realistic drama of our matter-of-fact, 'problem'puzzled stage. In this respect it is closer to the Chinese. But the plot is not distorted in order to make it harmonious with the extremest ecstasy of musical tone; it is, on the contrary, given the greatest possible clarification by the accompaniment. On one side of the stage sits an interpreter, decoratively ensconced, who comments upon what happens on the stage in a guttural and sometimes in a falsetto voice. In addition he gesticulates with an extreme

emphasis that seems to us not far from parody-a remnant of the Chinese fortissimo.

What a dualism the two stages symbolize! The Chinese orchestra opens the way to the inner depths of the action by means of its 'absolute' music. The Japanese interpreter undertakes to keep the spectator from missing anything that takes place on the stage. Is not this a key to the profundity of the Chinese and the rationalism of the Japanese? China seems like a huge disorderly studio in which lives a great artist who is quite indifferent to the life about him and lives only for the sake of creating. But the Japanese artist builds up about himself a beautiful environment and a host of collectors, connoisseurs, decorators. The Chinese artist creates things in the midst of dirt and disorder by checking nothing and using everything. He attains his goal- the beautiful. And the Japanese artist does no less, but he does it, as it were, within a frame. As a Japanese spectator, with his wife and children, all dressed with the most studied refinement, takes his place at the theatre in a 'box' carpeted with fine mats and fenced off by white wood, he achieves the same creation of beauty as is achieved on the stage itself. The Chinese artist creates a work out of mud and fire, and from then on is but little concerned with what may happen to it. The Japanese artist seeks the beautiful and clings to it. We shall always be able to understand the Japanese, because they weep in the theatre just as we do. Only with difficulty can we understand the Chinese at all, and we shall never understand them thoroughly.

ELLEN KEY's death, a few weeks ago, seemed to have more than any other recent death, perhaps as much a general as a personal significance; in her figure the Women's Movement of the late nineteenth century had a kind of symbolic embodiment. Among the utterances called forth in the European press by her death, not the least interesting is a short article by Ivan Trotskii - not the War Minister! - in Dni, the Paris Russian-language daily.

'Sweden mourns the loss,' he says, 'of a veteran leader of her intellectual Olympus, a writer and thinker who for more than half a century fought for individual and intellectual freedom. Like every defender of liberty, Ellen Key trod a stony path. Her fame and her influence on people's minds were won at a heavy cost. The uncrowned queen of Sweden, as she was called, knew, during her long and fruitful life, all the torments and mortifications that are the lot of the chosen. Only her will to live and a firm belief in people and in her own unusual strength helped her to surmount the tremendous obstacles that barred her way.

'Not until her very last years did she succeed in reaching the calm summit of unimpeachable fame. Human baseness, envy, and slander had not spared even her. And, what is most shocking, the dark campaign of blackening the good name of Ellen Key was led by Sweden's great writer a dramatist and artist whose genius overshadowed for years the other literary names of Scandinavia and whose name is known

to readers the world over. Strindberg's pamphlet-novel, The Black Banners, shortened the life of Gustaf af-Geierstam and inflicted an irremediable spiritual wound on Ellen Key. In Pai, the heroine of that novel, he caricatured her as a vicious demon, a true offspring of Hell. A quarter of a century has passed since the appearance of that monstrous lampoon, but Ellen Key and the Swedish literary world never forgot it for a single day. Her answer to Strindberg's inexcusable act was a silent withdrawal from Stockholm. She left the boiling whirlpool of literary dissensions for a quiet provincial corner where she continued to write and work in retirement.

'But even in spite of her retirement, the little town of Strand became a literary Mekka, a Swedish Iasnaia Poliana. Who did not go to that distant Northern haunt? What country did not send her intellectual pilgrims there to commune with the aging thinker? Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Englishmen, Americans, even Japanese and Chinese, found their way to Strand. Thoughtful, responsive, and courteous, Ellen Key never refused any one. The doors of her modest but unusually comfortable villa, filled with flowers, were always open. How this old woman, whose features till very recently were reminiscent of her former beauty, would rouse to animation whenever her favorite themes were touched upon!

'I was fortunate enough to meet her several times. The first time, I heard

her speak at the Pacifist Congress in Stockholm. What an amazing speech it was! She spoke of peace and disarmament with the passionate conviction of a humanitarian and an enemy of war. Her voice was full of genuine pathos. I remember that Bertha Suttner, the author of Down with Arms, literally trembled with emotion while listening to her. "This is the thing! This is what I did not know how to express in my own book! She is the one who must preach peace!"

"There was much else that she preached, besides peace. She was a tireless champion of women's social and political rights. She stood close to the labor movement, she fought the tendency to coarseness and brutality in literature, she labored to diffuse humanism in its purest form. In her investigations of Goethe's work she gave evidence of quite unusual critical power. What excited great aversion in her was the so-called literature of nakedness. Herself a rebel, a revolutionary, a seeker for truth, Ellen Key nevertheless could not accept the literary tendency that found its expression in Wedekind and his followers.

'In her personal life Ellen Key was more than unassuming. Coming as she did from an aristocratic family, and very popular in society both as a celebrity and as a woman, she always lived exclusively on what she earned. The last ten or twelve years of her life she devoted to helping the needy with her material means and her personal efforts. In Strand she built a "Recuperation House" for women engaged in menial work. She threw her whole soul into that enterprise; her thoughts were always with it. She bequeathed her whole fortune to it, and her last wish was to be given a modest funeral without wreaths or ceremonies. "Whoever wants to honor my memory," she 1 wrote in her testament, "let him con

tribute something to the 'House of Recuperation' instead instead of sending flowers for my coffin."

"The body of Ellen Key was cremated, in accordance with her wishes. A modest urn received the ashes of one of the best women of Scandinavia, whose name is to remain inscribed in the Pantheon of the world's literature.'

HAUPTMANN AS A SITTER

WHAT virtues does a portrait painter demand of his sitters? Is mere amiability and concessiveness enough, - if it leads to patient sitting, or should the subject coöperate with the artist in a sense in which he need not coöperate with a photographer? It would appear that a sitter may in fact be too amiable for the artist's purposes, if we are to believe Count Aldo Severi, the Italian portrait painter, who writes in the Berliner Tageblatt of some of his experiences in painting the playwright, Gerhardt Hauptmann, in his Italian home. In the five days which Count Severi was granted for the work, he encountered several obstacles, - bad light and his own depression among others, but the worst trial, he declares, was the sitter himself.

'Hauptmann himself is the chief obstacle to my work,' he writes of the first day's experience- 'the greatness and the beauty of my subject on the one hand, and his really lamentable -amiability on the other. He is entirely too friendly, too accommodating, too gentle. Of course he is showing this pleasant side of his personality wholly for my sake, but what can I do with it? It's of no value at all for the canvas! I know instinctively all the time that the Hauptmann I am seeing is not the real Hauptmann. He would certainly look very different indeed self-sufficient, imperious, peremptory.

Alas for me! He has granted me only five sittings. Let me assume my most lowering expression, and then perhaps, by heaven, he will relinquish this everlasting equable friendliness. But then he breaks into a hearty laugh, and of course I have to laugh too. A fine fix, to be sure! How shall I ever get anywhere? I must simply leave no stone unturned in order to get at the heart of the man's nature, and that quickly. I must conduct myself as if I were on a fencing floor trying to get at my opponent's body. After half an hour Hauptmann had had enough, and so had I. The perspiration was dripping from my forehead. Whew!'

Not until the third day did the Count manage to get what seemed to him a glimpse into his sitter's 'soul,' and on the fourth day-perhaps as a result of detecting the artist's malaise - Hauptmann posed in a virtually satisfactory manner. The following day, however, was ruined by bad lighting and low spirits. On the fifth and last day everything went beautifully too beautifully, for Hauptmann was growing impatient, and at the end of the first hour sprang up incontinently and exclaimed: 'Ecco fatto! Now we had better stop. I promised to sit five times for you, and now the picture is quite finished.' The painter protested that the clothes needed a little more touching up, but Hauptmann was adamant. "Take my word for it,' he said, 'and let it go as it is. Non ci faccia altro. One must n't make too much of a task like this. The picture pleases me as it is. Psychologically it has a great resemblance to the subject.'

MEMORIES OF DEBUSSY

THE French poet and Academician, Henri de Régnier, gives some reminiscences of the musician Debussy in a recent number of Les Nouvelles Litté

raires. 'I do not know,' he says, 'whether it was at the Independent Art Bookshop'-a famous shop in the Chaussée d'Antin kept by the singular Edmond Bailly-'that I first met Claude Debussy, but whenever I think of him it is in that setting. I recollect seeing him come in with his heavy and padded gait. I can see his slack and nonchalant body, the dull pallor of his face, his lively black eyes with their heavy lids, his enormous and strangely bulging forehead over which he brushed a long curling forelock-his whole appearance at once feline and gypsyish, ardent and concentrated.

"The rest of us would fall to chatting. Debussy would listen, thumb the leaves of a book, study an engraving. He loved books and bibelots, but he always came round finally to music, not saying much about himself, but speaking with some severity of his confrères. He spared almost no one except Vincent d'Indy and Ernest Chausson. I recall nothing very striking in these conversations, but his remarks were those of an intelligent man. He interested one by always maintaining a certain distance and elusiveness. I saw him frequently, and, though I never got to know him intimately, I admired him sincerely. I never was as close to him as he was to Pierre Louys.

'Indeed, it was at Pierre Louys's that I came nearest to Debussy. Louys lived at that time in the Rue Grétry in an old house where he occupied several tastefully furnished rooms, already full of books. Debussy came to the Rue Grétry almost every day, and I myself was frequently there. I often saw him sit down at the piano. I heard him play his Baudelairean melodies, fragments from Tristan, and almost all of Pelléas, day by day as he was composing it. In spite of my ignorance of music, I had the feeling that an important musical work was coming into existence, and

that the author of Pelléas was a musician with a great future. At the first performance of the opera my feeling was confirmed. After that period I saw Debussy only at rather irregular intervals, but we continued on the same friendly terms, and when, on the day of his funeral, I went to pay tribute to his memory, it was not only out of respect for a great musician, but also in memory of the Debussy of the Rue Grétry and the Chausée d'Antin.'

A FORGOTTEN HYMN-WRITER

'THEY have just been celebrating at Wrexham the centenary of Bishop Heber's death,' says the Daily Telegraph. "The odd convention which ordains that little notice should be taken of the authors of the words of hymns has left people who know many of his verses by heart ignorant of who he was, or even that it was he who wrote the familiar lines. But if literary power is to be judged by the general affection for an author's work, Reginald Heber was a great man. In any list of a dozen of the most popular English hymns one or two of his would certainly be found. Everybody knows the words of "From Greenland's icy mountains." Whatever some of us may think of its artificiality, it is idle to deny that the author was expressing the thoughts and emotions of hosts of people in verse which seems to them beautiful.

'But Heber could do more than that. If sound criticism were compiling a list of the hymns in English which for sincerity and depth of feeling and mastery of expression are in the first rank, the list could not be long, but in it would surely be two which Heber wrote, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Al

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mighty," and "The Son of God goes forth to war.' It is a remarkable achievement, for Heber, though an almost faultless and a perfectly charming person, nowhere else comes near great things or the grand style. Rather pompously, rather unkindly, it has been said that "his verse is wanting in the divine afflatus."

'One story of him hits off much more exactly just what he could do, and how. Heber won the Newdigate in 1803 with what some still think the best prize poem ever written. The subject was Palestine. Walter Scott came to Oxford, and Heber read to him the de

scription of Solomon's Temple. Sir Walter, always amiable, said they were very pretty verses, but the poet had forgotten the most remarkable thing Heber took the hint, and the only lines that the Temple was built without tools. out of his poem which anyone now remembers are:

'No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung; Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.

"That gives his measure. He had a command of easy, rather ornate and mannered style; he was comfortable in any metre. Give him a touch of inspiration and he might strike out something great. But the power was not of himself. For the rest, he was the most amiable of men, a devoted parish priest, a missionary bishop who sacrificed his life to his work. Let us also remember that to the kindly wit of Heber we owe "the best comic poem, except the Ingoldsby Legends, ever written by a clergyman' that version of Bluebeard in which Fatima is assured by her sister that the bridegroom's silks and pearls are undeniable, and for her part she "don't think his whiskers so frightfully blue."