'MAX has never given us a better show,' says Desmond McCarthy in the radical New Statesman, and, conversely, in all the awful condemnation of italics: 'They are assuredly in the worst possible taste,' says Sir Claude Phillips roundly in the conservative Daily Telegraph. Between those two opinions and inclining to the latter, range the art critics of the London press, and their subject is none other than Max Beerbohm-Max the irrepressible, Max the light of touch, the gay, the airy, the inimitable, the insouciant, and once too often — the impertinent. For Max has had another show of his cartoons at the Leicester Galleries, and he has dared to lay a flippant pencil upon the sacred person of British Royalty itself. It is too much. The pundits of the London press rally to the defense of their harassed monarch, while only a few wicked journalists of the Labor papers venture to chuckle in public; but it is worth recollecting that only a year ago there were alarums and excursions because a Beerbohm cartoon ridiculed the Labor Party.

--

The offending drawings deal with two generations of the House of Windsor, though not with King George himself. King Edward VII and his grandson, the Prince of Wales, are the victims, though the king is obviously beyond speaking for himself and the prince maintains a discreet silence. The cartoons of King Edward are presented as 'Proposed Illustrations for Sir Sidney Lee's Forthcoming Biography,' and consist of a series of caricatures of the king, beginning with his earliest youth and ending with a somewhat majestic angel, haloed and playing on the harp. Tucked away with

delicate malice in each picture is a lady in the fashionable garb of the decade represented in the royal life.

'Downright vulgar and far from diverting,' says Sir Claude of the cartoon which satirizes the Prince of Wales's unwillingness to marry. This is called 'Long Choosing and Beginning Late.' The cartoon represents a very old man, whose features are characteristic of the royal House of Windsor, being married in a registry office. An imaginary Bolshevist revolution has taken place, and the Throne has been abolished. The legend has occasioned a good share of the offense:

(Extract from the Times - November

10, 1972.)

An interesting wedding was quietly celebrated yesterday at the Ealing Registry Office, when Mr. Edward Windsor was united to Miss Flossie Pearson. The bridegroom, as many of our elder readers will recall, was at one time well known as 'heirapparent' of the late 'King' George. He has for some years been residing at 'Balmoral,' 85, Acacia Terrace, Lenin Avenue, Ealing; and his bride is the only daughter of his landlady. Immediately after the ceremony the happy pair traveled to Rams gate, where the honeymoon will be spent. Interviewed later in the day by a Times

man,

the aged mother-in-law confessed that she had all along been opposed to the union, because of the disparity between the ages of the two parties the bride being still on the sunny side of forty. 'I had always,' she said, 'hoped that my Flossie was destined. to make a brilliant match.' Now that the knot was tied, however, the old lady was

evidently resigned to the fait accompli. I

believe,' she said, 'that Mr. Windsor will make a good husband for my girl, for I must say that a nicer, quieter gentleman, or a more pleasant-spoken, never lodged under my roof.'

As if to fill the cup of his offending, Max has added a cartoon of 'Lord Lascelles inspecting the Panama hat designed and trimmed for him by Queen Mary.' This, says Sir Claude, is 'impertinent, no doubt, and disrespectful, but not really ill-natured.'

Perhaps it is worth recalling that the critic himself was honored with Max's attention some ten or twelve years ago. Hence, perhaps, his sympathy with injured royalty. He knows how it feels, for the caption to his portrait ran, 'Sir Claude Phillips doing his best not to find my caricatures in the worst possible taste.' It is in rejoinder to this that Sir Claude delivers his icily italicized response across the gap of a decade.

9

The drawings have since been withdrawn, after Max Beerbohm had Beerbohm had written to the owners of the gallery, 'I take no stand in the matter. No question of principle is involved. The question is one of taste merely, and I cannot strike a dignified attitude and say to the public in solemn tones, "My taste, believe me, is perfect." This may be chastened humility on the part of him whom all literary England knows as Max; but if so, it is for the first time. Perhaps a dreadful perhaps there is a subtle innuendo lurking in that refusal to proclaim, 'My taste, believe me, is perfect.' Is Max gunning for his critics?

For the rest of the exhibition the critics have nothing but praise, save that a few find a slight falling-off in humor. Most important are nine drawings illustrating the changes in French, German, and British political relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with Napoleon I and ending with France in the Ruhr. Militarism is symbolized by an eagle's beak, which is introduced into the figures representing Napoleonic France, Germany in the early years

of the twentieth century,' and France to-day. Napoleon III has an obviously false one, tied on with a string.

No exception is taken to a cartoon in which King Victor Emmanuel of Italy is represented as saying to King George, as both monarchs gaze in some dismay upon the gigantic figure of Signor Mussolini, 'He has worked wonders. If at any time you 'd like me to lend him to you.' This is headed "The Beneficent Despot. One Constitutional Monarch to Another'; but since it is regarded as 'an orthodox political caricature,' no one gets angry.

In 'The Eternal Invalid,' a figure of British drama, which appears to be very ill indeed, is surrounded by a group of specialists. Mr. St. John Ervine, who writes for a Sunday paper, exclaims, 'Give her a strong tonic every Sunday morning.' 'Give her a mask,' says Gordon Craig, and characteristically 'I was once her lover,' sighs George Moore.

Perhaps the best of all is the very much dismayed Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson confronting his Success—a very large, fat, red lady who carries what appears to be a pineapple. The caption: 'Success! So this was she! In his youth he had often dreamed of her, but he had not imagined her quite like this. This was she! Success!'

HEART-SEARCHINGS IN THE BRITISH

THEATRE

FOR Some time there have been hints in the British press that the British public is waking up to a painful truth of which British critics have long been unpleasantly aware. As Mr. W. A. Darlington, the dramatic critic of the London Daily Telegraph, plainly puts it, "The British Theatre, it is agreed on all hands, is in a poor way.' With that, however, agreement ends. The actor blames the manager, the

manager blames the actor, while the critic is inclined to blame them both and to pass on a share of the blame to the British public.

Indeed, it begins to look as if the United States can produce a more intelligent body of playgoers than London a fact which may somewhat atone for the notorious lack of dramatists in this country. Commercial playwrights we have in plenty, and some who may be deserving of a better title; but America, however active her theatrical life may be, simply has not yet given birth to dramatists who can rank with Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Barker, or Jones.

Yet there are signs of change in the British heart. Mr. William Archer, when in this country, was highly impressed with the work being done in Professor Baker's dramatic course at Harvard. He went back to England to spread the gospel. Some time ago Mr. Granville Barker was appointed lecturer on the drama in Liverpool University. Now London University has gone a step further and has introduced a 'diploma in dramatic art with special reference to the actor's art.' The new course is to occupy two years and will provide for dramatic training in both practice and theory. Each candidate for the diploma will have to undergo a practical test in the use of voice, phonetics, diction, movement and acting. He will also have to pass an examination in the following subjects:

General principles of English poetics General outlines of the history of the drama, Shakespeare, and selected plays

cial reference to social life, manners, customs, costume

Elements of appreciation of music Elements of physics, as applied to stage-craft.

In addition, a third-year course is provided for those who wish to become teachers; this includes phonetics, voice-training, and other similar subjects, and stage direction.

Naturally the University does not think that it can make anybody and everybody into an actor. What it does hope is that, given a student with a natural bent for the stage, it can teach him the elements of his art. An actor will no longer have to pick his fundamentals up as best he

can.

Although this progress encourages English lovers of the theatre, it does not by any means satisfy them. Mr. Darlington complains in the Telegraph that all this is admirable in its way, but there is to be found in it no provision for the special needs of the most important figure in the theatrical world of present-day London - the young playwright. This opinion is echoed by Mr. Dennis Eadie, the London manager, who writes to the Morning Post as follows:

'Let both the Press and public use their influence to bring about the institution of a chair for the drama at our Universities, including the London University, and by this means practically a State and formal recognition of the extreme importance of legitimate drama. America established a chair for the drama at Harvard University several years ago, and it is occupied to this day by Professor George P. Baker, with the result that not only is the study of the drama pos

KREISLER IN JAPAN

FRITZ KREISLER's Japanese tour appears to have been almost as great a success as his numerous American tours. The great violinist has played in most of the principal cities of Japan and gave a series of five concerts in the Imperial Theatre, Tokyo.

To judge from the programmes which have reached this country, the violinist is to some extent allowing for Japanese unfamiliarity with Western music and is not playing his 'heaviest' programmes. At his first Tokyo recital he did play the Bach G-minor Sonata which he followed with the Vivaldi C-major Concerto and a prelude and allegro of Gaetano Pugnani. His familiar Caprice Viennois was SO heartily received that the violinist had to repeat it. The familiar RimskyKorsakoff numbers were very much in evidence, and also the Tambourin Chinois, of which a writer in the Japan Advertiser says: "The artist has captured something of the spirit of Oriental music and translated it into the musical terms of the Occident.' He also played the Indian Lament and his own Liebesfreud.

At the conclusion of the Bach Sonata the Alliance Musicale du Japon presented him with a gold medal. In recognition of this compliment Kreisler played the Tartini Trill du Diablethe significance of his choice is not reported. The great majority of the audience at his first recital was Japanese. As might have been expected the German and Austrian members of the foreign colony were next most numerous.

PAUL POIRET AS AN ART COLLECTOR

M. PAUL POIRET's high repute as a designer of gowns has eclipsed his reputation as a lover and patron of the arts. Some time ago the Parisian press took an interest in the little theatre which he founded in his home. Now it is interested in an exhibition of his private collection of paintings which has been opened to the public.

M. Poiret was hardly more than a boy when he began to save his pocket money and invest his savings in art. At eighteen he already owned three paintings by Desbrosses. He has been lucky-perhaps 'intelligent' would be a better word in his purchases and has been able to pick up some of the earlier works of artists who afterward became famous, while they were still struggling for recognition. In talking to one of Figaro's contributors he boasts of having bought his first Matisse as early as 1896, and as M. Poiret then observed: 'My confidence has not been misplaced.' He also was an early admirer of the landscape painter Ségonzac and of Van Dongen.

M. Poiret believes that owners of private collections ought to be legally compelled to open their treasures periodically to the public. 'If I were Minister of Fine Arts,' he said, 'I should keep a hall in the Luxembourg specially for temporary exhibitions. Every private collector would be compelled to display his best pieces there every twenty years, and if he refused there would be a fine of 100,000 francs which would enable the State to enlarge our museums.'

Phantom, by Gerhart Hauptmann. London: Secker, 1923. 78. 6d.

Victoria, by Knut Hamsun. London: Gyldendal, 1923.5s.

[Gerald Gould in the Saturday Review]

THE beggarmaid must love the prince, and the princess the swineherd's son. It is obligatory. The truth of our fairy tales depends upon it. It is not till the fairy tales come to the wedding that they leave the truth behind. Love, in life, has more terrors and vicissitudes, tears, partings, and mistakes. We need not go as far as life to find them; literature is full of them; but the fairy-tale moral returns in the fact, which only the most decadent literatures have questioned, that love remains ever-surprisingly worth while. There must be contrast, must there not? And proportion? And risk, if there is to be gain? Very well, then: here come two good writers with no plot but the old legend, no moral but the old commonplace, who preach the triumph of love in tragic loss.

The names of Gerhart Hauptmann and Knut Hamsun are familiar even among those of us who cannot pretend to offer an estimate of their standing in their own lands. The latter has been hailed by certain of our critics in language that would be appropriate to only the very greatest. Certainly, in this particular book of his, there is nothing to justify such language; and yet there are qualities which, but for a deep and frigid skepticism about the use of that word, one easily could hail as great. A large and careless simplicity, careless, not of form, but of convention; a handling of thought's fantastic flights with that prodigious certainty of the man who lets loose his doves and knows they will come home; a lyrical exaltation; a seeking of loveliness in sorrow one is conscious of all these, and conscious too that probably in a translation, however good, they lose much of themselves; and yet one hesitates, one is not rapt and conquered. About Phantom I feel no such hesitation: it is a great book, without qualification or reserve. I will not say that it challenges comparison with Dostoevskii; but it brings him to mind.

The parallel between these two stories extends to the external details. Both are very short, as novels go: each is a vision to be caught in one view. In each the hero loves a girl remote from him in worldly status, and comes to grief through his love. But in essentials the difference is acute. Knut Hamsun departs scarcely at all from the

established lines of his theme; one could, without actual falsehood, so outline his plot as to make it sound like a serial in a cheap newspaper. The girl reciprocates the man's love, but must marry, to save her father from ruin, someone of her own social position. She wavers desperately: she will neither give up the man she loves, nor go to him; and in the end she loses her lover, her health, her life.

That this happens often enough in print as well as practice is no reason why a writer of genius should not lift it to the plane of poetry. But Hauptmann's story goes deeper, and higher. Here let our busy psychologists look for an interpretation of possession and obsession that links mania to our common mortal lot, instead of putting it in the place thereof! Here are the red blood and wild thoughts of a brother-subject-matter for medical analysis, no doubt, but conceived in an atmosphere other than the medical. (When medicine and religion do really at last come together, we shall see something; but that is a different story.)

The Fascisti Movement in Italian Life, by Dr.
Pietro Gorgolini. Preface by Benito Musso-
lini. London: Fisher Unwin, 1923.
Mussolini: The Birth of a New Democracy, by
G. M. Godden. Dublin: Burns, Oates, and
Washbourne, 1923.

[Times Literary Supplement]

The Fascisti Movement in Italian Life, by Doctor Pietro Gorgolini, with a preface by Signor Mussolini, will be published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin next week. The work, which presents a picture of the Fascisti movement in its relation to Socialism, Communism, Bolshevism, Capitalism, Nationalism, and Internationalism, has been translated and edited, with an introduction, by M. D. Petre. A second account of the same movement will shortly be issued by Messrs. Burns, Oates, and Washbourne in a volume entitled Mussolini: The Birth of a New Democracy, by G. M. Godden, another close student of the Fascisti leader's life, policy, and achievements. This also includes a preface by Signor Mussolini.

BOOKS MENTIONED

DAVIES, W. H. Collected Poems. Second Series. London: Jonathan Cape, 1923.