tional site, but on the hill southeast of Jerusalem at Ophel. Dom Giulio de' Rossi, writing in the Corriere d'Italia, declares that the commonly accepted legend is ridiculous and 'was circulated by an Israelite in the fourteenth century.' He adds that 'enemies of Catholicism and of Italy' base their arguments on it in order to contest 'our indisputable rights.' The situation is complicated by the fact that the tomb is a shrine for worshipers of three religions-Christians, Jews, Christians, Jews, and Mussulmans. Dom Giulio calls on the Italian Government to intervene and prevent any work on the excavation until the claims of the King of Italy have been settled. These claims are based on King Victor Emmanuel's position as heir of the Kings of Naples. In 1333 King Robert and Queen Sancia obtained possession from the Sultan of Egypt, through the good offices of Franciscan Friars. By 1429 the Jews had secured the crypt, and within less than one hundred years the Mohammedans were in full possession. LEOPOLD JESSNER ON THE ART OF THE THEATRE AFTER Max Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, with whom his ideas on the art of the theatre differ sharply, is probably the greatest regisseur of Germany, a country which has been almost unrivaled in its experiments with scenic art. Since he has become manager of the State Theatre in Berlin, Jessner occupies an increasingly important position in the theatrical world. In an interview with a correspondent of the London Observer, he declared that he found a new feeling both on the German stage and among the German audiences. 'Not the stuff, but the spirit,' he said, 'not the fact, but the symbol is what is demanded to-day. The public are rejecting plays that tell them of things as they were in what was once known as society. We cannot present realities that are truths no longer. 'We cannot give them a story that will be old by to-morrow, typical of a day, or even a section of society that is past. But we can fire them with an idea and let the atmosphere of the stage all bear upon that idea. My "Tell" is a pacific Tell, forced to fight against his will. He breathes the very spirit of pacifism; there is nothing of the sword about him. He suits the moment admirably, but we shall be forced to give the great plays of great dramatists more and more as time goes on. "There are unhappily no new ones in Germany worth playing. Georg Kaiser has disappointed: Wedekind, the last man breathing revolutionary ideas into a stagnating society, unreal but symbolical, we play. We of the State theatres, the subventioned theatres, with certain duties toward our public, know what we have to offer the university professor, the teacher, the struggling intellectual, and those of small means who take their theatregoing seriously. These are the only trammels left of the old Court traditions controlling theatrical life in Germany. To understand the old régime the foreigner must picture four-andtwenty reigning dukes and princelings with nothing to say in managing affairs of State and certain ambitions in the theatrical line, which their managers and actors were bound to respect. 'Our fetters are different. Only the organized playgoer could save the municipal theatre in Germany, and the organized playgoer has come in time. nings, and their wishes are bound to be respected as regards the fare offered, just as the People's Theatres, though wider in their sympathies, prefer frankly those plays with a direct proletarian appeal. Is it not natural under these circumstances that the theatre becomes more and more destined to express the dominating emotion of certain crises in the voice of a recognized master of such an emotion? 'How are the subventioned theatres getting on? Obliged to keep their seats within the capacity of the classes I mentioned, they are getting on as badly as they can. But I have an idea that is maturing if it succeeds there will be, beside a State theatre, producing plays, an affiliated company producing films appealing to a yet wider class-films bearing the same stamp of the idea prevailing over the actuality. I can explain this best by saying that a mountain on the film can look like a picture-postcard, but the picture of one precipitous side expresses the whole vastness that should be suggested. Struggling between American magnificence and Scandinavian detailed simplicity, the German film has yet to make its own way. On these lines we shall be expressing our own selves best · as we are expressing it to-day in the theatre. With everything else ruined, it is possible that those abroad may recognize the spirit breathing from the stage as typical of all that Germany is feeling and thinking, struggling to utter or to overcome.' ICONOCLASM IN LONDON It is perhaps only a coincidence that just at the time when England is celebrating very generally the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir Christopher Wren it is proposed to tear down several of his buildings in London to make room for more modern structures. On this subject F. Y. remarks, in the Saturday Review of February 24:— It is a strange thing that while we profess to cultivate beauty in one direction, we are always ready to destroy it in another. Everyone is writing about Christopher Wren this week, and about the beauty of his buildings. Yet it is proposed to celebrate his centenary by pulling down a number of his City churches. The reason alleged for this is that the money which could be got for them is needed to build churches in the suburbs. Why? People in the suburbs can quite afford to build churches if they really want them. Moreover, there is such a thing as keeping faith with the dead benefactors, who built and endowed these churches in the City. They may have been very foolish to put them there; but they did put them there, and gave their money to keep them there, and to enable a ministry to be carried on in them. No one really has any right to seize them because the Bishop of London and some of his friends would like to build churches elsewhere. ART AND FRONTIERS MUSIC is taking the lead among the arts in reasserting the adage that 'art knows no frontiers,' as is proved by the success of the German Opera in New York, and the triumph in London of the pianist, Mitja Nikisch, son of the famous conductor. The day, however, of the resumption of academic relations between the enemies of the late war does not seem to have yet arrived, if we are to ascribe any significance to the decision of the authorities of Oxford not to allow the presence for a month at that university of twelve German students whose expenses were to be paid by the volunteer subscriptions of certain Oxford dons and undergraduates. This refusal has been widely commented upon in the press of the Central Powers. One wonders to what extent it was motivated by the famous, or infamous, declaration of the ninetythree Teutonic intellectuals in 1914. A PREHISTORIC STATUETTE La Vanguardia informs us that M. de Saint-René recently presented to the Académie des Inscriptions et Beaux Arts a marble statuette which was found in the region of HauteGaronne. He demonstrated that the statuette, which represents a woman and is about fifteen centimetres high, bears undoubted resemblance to the objects of our contemporary Negro art and also to the prehistoric sculptures of Grimaldi, Lannel, and Willendorf in Austria. The fact that the statuette belongs to the Aurignacian epoch is indicated by the stratum in which it was found. The age of this period of art is difficult to determine; it must have been from twenty to sixty thousand years ago. Even at this time, while gigantic prehistoric creatures still flour ished, human art was already at a comparatively high stage of develop ment. THE ALHAMBRA THREATENED WITH RUIN El Sol brings the discouraging tidings that the Alhambra, ‘this marvelous work of art, this pride of Spain,' is threatened with ruin unless it ceases to be a plaything in the hands of politicians, and its guardianship and restoration are entrusted to the right man. "The Alhambra will be saved. because Spain wants it so,' says the paper emphatically. But it is confessed, at the same time, that the marvelous structure is 'nearly in ruins.' THE STRUGGLE FOR A CATALAN CULTURE BARCELONA is the scene of a determined struggle by the people of Catalonia against the academic policies of Castilian Spain, which is endeavoring to make all Spain Castilian. At a recent lecture it was emphasized that during the Middle Ages three great universities represented the culture of the Iberian Peninsula, and one of these universities, that of Lérida, was Catalonian. The lecturer complained that so far as Catalonia is concerned the only result of the Government's policy of extending Castilian culture consists in 'giving diplomas of ineptitude to the Catalan youth.' A few governmental decrees were quoted which demonstrate the hostility of the central authorities toward the development and use of the Catalan dialect of the Spanish language. Catalanization of the university of Cervera was demanded as a means of restoring the freedom of the province. L'Argentine devant l'histoire, by José Pacifico Otero. Preface by M. Alfred Croiset. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1922. [Raymond Ronze in La Revue de l'Amérique Latine] L'Argentine devant l'histoire, by M. José Pacifico Otero, belongs to a kind of philosophy of history that is highly appreciated in Latin America but which we in France regard with some suspicion, because, you see, we know that you can find in history facts enough to support any theory. And we are led to deny any scientific value or even any trial value to such attempts. M. Otero's book, therefore, belongs to a class that has to be condemned, especially in the present state of historic science in the Americas. But the very sharpness of our criticism enables us to praise the intelligence of the author, his patriotic enthusiasm, and his eloquence, qualities which we must mention here because they cannot appear in a brief summary of his work. The nine chapters of the first volume, the only one published so far, take us up to 1830. They embrace the emancipation period of the Spanish colonies and the formation of the states. The first epoch is the most interesting, if not the most dramatic, of Argentine history. The May Revolution, democratic and national, is symbolized by M. Otero in the person and work of Mariano Moreno, the expulsion of the Spaniards in the stirring episode of San Martín, the organization of the republic in the hasty but fruitful labor of Rivadavia. Then comes the second period, which M. Alfred Croiset, in his preface, calls the era of difficulties — the civil war in the maritime provinces, Artigas and Ramirez, the separation of the Bande Orientale, and the beginning of the struggle between the federalists and the unitarians, Lavalle and Dorrego. An Autobiography, by Elizabeth Butler. Lon don: Constable, 1923. 188. [New Statesman] Ir is nearly fifty years ago now since Lady Butler's famous Roll-Call took London by storm. In the spring of 1874 Miss Elizabeth Thompson as she then was painted the picture which brought her, as she herself relates with very nice modesty, 'such utterly unexpected celebrity.' All her youth had been spent in preparation for that triumph. From early childhood, spent largely in Italy with her sister, the late Mrs. Alice Meynell, her sketchbooks had been stuffed with sketches of soldiers and horses. The war against Austria was just over; Magenta, Solferino, Montebello these names resounded. Then came the Garibaldi enthusiasm, and the children became ardent Garibaldians. 'I saw the Liberator the day before he sailed from Quarto for his historical landing in Sicily,' writes Lady Butler. 'He was sitting in a little arbor overlooking the sea. . . . I made a penand-ink memory sketch of him.' The Thompsons arrived in London when the volunteer movement was in full swing. The young artist became even more enthusiastic over the citizen soldiers than she had been over the Garibaldini. Again her sketchbooks were filled with British Volunteers in every conceivable uniform. One of the deepest impressions of girlhood came from a visit to the battlefield of Waterloo. 'It was there,' she wrote in her diary at the time, 'that I most felt the sickening terror of war, and that I looked upon it from the dark side, a thing I have seldom had so strong an impulse to do before.' The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 first turned her attention pictorially to battle scenes. Once she began on that line, she says, she went at a gallop, and many a subject she sent to the galleries, all the drawings selling quickly. 1872 was the year of her introduction to the British Army. She saw the autumn manœuvres, and in consequence of sketches from these came the order for the Roll-Call. The painter's scrupulous care for correct details of uniform and accoutrement makes interesting and amusing reading; also the extracts from the diaries which record how on the opening day of the Royal Academy she awoke and found herself famous. Other pictures followed Sedan, Quatre Bras, Scotland Forever; then in 1879, The Defense of Rorke's Drift, commissioned by Queen Victoria. In 1879 Miss Thompson married Major, afterward Sir William, Butler, and interwoven with the story of her artistic career is the story of her life as a devoted wife and mother. Bird Haunts and Nature Memories, by T. A. Coward. London: Warne, 1923. 78. 6d. Birds in Flight, by W. P. Pycraft. Illustrated by Rowland Green. London: Gay and Hancock, 1922. 153. [The Nation and the Athenæum] MR. COWARD has achieved so just and widespread a reputation for his handbook, British Birds and Their Eggs, that he needs no introduction even to the reader but slightly interested in natural history. His present volume is a miscellaneous collection of bird observations on the coast of Wales, on the Humber and Dee estuaries, in South Devon, in Cheshire, his home county, and at Solway; of antiquarian and other memories in Wales, Cheshire, and Lancashire; of new information on the Noctule bat, and of discussions on tragedy in Nature and the preservation of our fauna. The descriptive portions of the book are principally of sea, wading, and other birds which appear on the coasts on migration, and here he gives us some very interesting accounts of the species he saw and their movements. Mr. Pycraft's book professes to be only an introduction to the methods of distinguishing birds in the field by their flight, since it is intended for the novice. Within those limits the work is very capably done, and covers a wide scope. The book shows a humane feeling not very common among museum experts in England, and a knowledge of field natural history as rare. These, with the more technical elements, Mr. Pycraft welds into an attractive whole, and no man has done more toward popularizing natural history than this very learned zoologist. He it is, we believe, who is largely responsible for the admirable nature films which cinemas exhibit all too rarely, and this educative work, combined with books like the present, is of real civilizing value. Gott Stinnes (Stinnes, the God), by E. Ortner. Hanover: P. Stegemann, 1923. [L'Europe Nouvelle] BIOGRAPHY? Satire? Panegyric? The peculiar form of this work leaves us undecided. Considered as a biography, it contains nothing new. The idea developed is that Herr Stinnes represents a conception of life suited to the present hour and to the future too. He is rising from the horizon while D'Annunzio declines. Dante the Man and the Poet, by Mary Brad ford Whiting. Illustrated by Ascanio Teal Cambridge: Heffer. 98. net. [Saturday Review] THE author has written for the general reader another life of Dante. The result is a pleasam book, easy in style, and supported by charming illustrations. Of Dante in general we learn al that is generally known, and we follow hirn here with that reverential attitude attached to men of genius whose work everybody is supposed to know. But the public includes that inquiring and not very reverential person who says or thinks 'Dante was a man as I am. He was sometimes wrong, out of temper, sometimes even absurd. There is not much for such a person in this life, but we are glad to see that Beatrice is regarded as a real woman, the daughter of Folco Portinari, married to somebody else. Boccaccio, the first lecturer on Dante, is wisely followed, and there is really no reason to suppose that he misstated the facts. Whether Dante was, in the light of the future, right or wrong in his views of Italy, is a large question which might be widely debated. His reputation was certainly not steadily increased through the centuries, any more than Shakespeare's. He had little to say to the men of the Renaissance that they wanted to hear, and the author, unless she has got hold of research we do not know, has put much too early the addition of the word 'Divine' to Dante's great work. BOOKS ANNOUNCED GLASGOW, GEORGE. The Minoans. London: Jonathan Cape, 1923. For early publication. An account of the recent discoveries at Knossos, Crete. King Tutankhamen is not the only ancient monarch who has recently found himself dug up by an impertinent and inquiring century King Minos, too, has been dug out of his ancient tomb at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans. Minoan civilization was at its height long before the Eighteenth Dynasty, to which Tutankhamen belonged. The book is copiously illustrated and is intended to be intelligible to those who are not professed students of archaology. BOOKS MENTIONED NALLINO, C. A. Sull' Infondata Leggenda della |