T

WO things perhaps contributed

to my feeling of slight disappointment on coming away from the Theatre Guild's production of "Porgy," the folk-play of South Carolina Negro life along the Charleston water-front. It has been inordinately praised; and I read the book when it was published last year.

Certainly "read the book and see the play" is not the best of all possible advice. Instead of enjoying the play more, one is apt to be like the child who is grieved when the story departs even slightly from what is already well understood beforehand. In this case I knew the story could easily be compressed within the limits of the two hours and a half, and I expected it to be magnificently presented.

In one sense, it is. Cleon Throckmorton has caught up the orangesplashed, blue-shadowed colors of Catfish Row and made them serve far beyond ordinary limits of stage settings. Also Rouben Mamoulian has directed the Negroes' singing of the spirituals with a wondrously skillful eye to their dramatic effect upon the narrative. He has directed them much as a grandopera conductor would, catching the precise dramatic pitch of the scenes and carrying them on higher with the music, until several of them verge on positive genius-notably the one in the highceilinged room with the boarded-up shutters and the broken plaster decorations, where the Negroes are gathered singing, while outside the hurricane rises and knocks upon the door with the knuckles of Death.

Higher and higher rises the hurricane, and the music rises with it. On the wall the shadows of the Negroes tower and sway like giants from a devil's lamp. Crash! The door is flung open and Crown enters. Crown, the murderer, naked to the waist. Crown, not afraid of the devil. Filled with ironic laughter over the fear of the Negroes huddled before him. Friend of God. phemer.

Crash!

Blas

And over against it now Crown, the defiant savage, jeers, dances, strikes crippled Porgy and does a breakdown among the frightened Africans like some evil spirit of the hurricane itself. Color, emotion, and music; scenes of

Done with

Our Own Theatre List "Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. vim, rum, and pistols. "The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history which might have been a great play if genuine emotion had been substituted for wisecracking. An amusing evening, as it is. "The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck. -Vaudeville and melodrama, with vaudeville taking the tricks. "Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor.

"Escape," The Booth.-Strung on a thin thread, but the most satisfying play on Broadway.

"The Good Hope," Civic Repertory Theatre. -A slow tragedy of the men who comb the sea for fish and the women they leave behind,

"Trial of Mary Dugan," National.-Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial. "Balieff's Chauve-Souris," Cosmopolitan."Mother Goose" under one arm, the "Arabian Nights" under the other. "An Enemy of the People," Hampden's Theatre.-It's bitter; but it's Ibsenand true. "Coquette," Maxine Elliott.-A tragedy of youth and small-town life in the South.

Musical Shows

"Hit the Deck," Belasco.-Louise Groody-
and a fast show.

"The Five O'clock Girl," Forty-fourth Street
Theatre.-Has nearly everything.
"Good News," Chanin.-We haven't seen it,
but our friends like it.
"The Mikado," Royale.-Our old friends Gil-
bert and Sullivan excellently represented.
"The Merry Malones," Erlanger's.-George
Cohan-and everybody dances.
"Manhattan Mary," Apollo.-Ed Wynn.
What more?

despair and fear, primitive love and hate; a clear impression of African Negro life lived as a totally separate, untouched thing within our civilization -all these are contained in "Porgy," as well as much more. It is real darky life, of the most primitive sort, as lived along the Charleston water-front, mirrored with extraordinary sincerity and fidelity. On the tragedy of Porgy and the only woman he ever had, Crown's Bess, are strung many poignant scenes of murder and passion, of superstition and fear, of Negro humor and naïveté. Coming from it, one realizes the thin veneer of civilization that coats many of our lower-class American Negroes. Beyond that, one has beheld and listened to a gorgeous thing, worth going to simply for its pastel colors and primitive music.

Where, then, is there disappointment?

First of all, frankly, in the acting. Porgy himself does not catch and hold the imagination as did Porgy of the book-Porgy of the goat-cart, who sat silent and rapt all day long, begging and dozing lightly in the terrific heat of King Charles Street; conveying to those who gave him alms a disquieting impression, a sense of infinite patience that only half concealed a terrific energyan energy realized at night in Catfish Row, where life became intense, burning with excitement, and he threw the ivories with the stevedores and fishermen. Sphinx by day; crippled gambler by night.'

From the Porgy of the book I received an impression of strength which I did not get from the character as portrayed on the Guild Theatre stage. To me, therefore, by that much the drama loses power.

Beyond that the play that has been fashioned is frankly merely an episodic, pictorial folk-play. The book is followed very closely-except at the endand the dramatic thread that binds the scenes is very. thin. Astoundingly weak curtains are only partially redeemed by music and color. Even the "Fifteen" struck by the hurricane bell while Catfish Row waits for the grim warning and the wind starts to rise peters out into a very flat moment. Nothing at all happens-presumably because, in a book on real life, a hurricane is plenty. In the play, however, one is left wishing for something more; the return, perhaps, at that instant of Crown, or something to point the reality of life as lived by the characters.

To a certain extent, the play is thus afflicted all the way through. Events are not so ordered as to bring about proper climaxes. At any moment a good stage picture is considered enough to bring down the curtain. Much is thus lost. For whether the spectator analyzes his dissatisfaction or not, it is there. What could easily have been a great play of the emotions of Negroes remains simply a colorful folk-tale worth seeing, worth hearing, but not worth writing down as dramatic literature.

As interesting as the play, to me, was the fact that next to me were two exceedingly intelligent colored people

man and girl-to whom the whole affair was clearly as much a spectacle of African primitives as it was to me. They felt, apparently, much as you or I would feel at a play on Carolina or Kentucky mountaineers of the most ignorant sort: amused, thrilled, and interested, but in no sense identified.

The world does move.

I wish it had moved Heyward's fine book into a better play-or at least into American grand opera. Is there no American composer who will consider this?

Who's Afraid?

(Continued from page 401)

was doomed in advance to fail. The task which dropped from his hands was left for a wiser, though no more courageous, generation to perform.

As the Malolo rose quietly and serenely to the level of Gatun Lake, passed through the severed backbone of the Isthmus, and descended again to the waters of the Pacific, it traversed a route made passable by mankind through something more than cruelty and greed. Greed and cruelty have indeed dyed black the history of the Isthmus of Panama, but its palm-clad hills and blue waters have witnessed dreams and visions that were sheer poetry.

THE

A

HE Malolo lies, as I write, at her dock awaiting the moment when she shall begin her first voyage to Hawaii. Above her spacious decks rises the rugged skyline of San Francisco. little over two decades ago those hills were a flaming furnace. Men and women saw in that holocaust the end of lifetimes of labor and the destruction of all that they held dear, and yet before the ruins ceased from smoldering they had set their faces towards the future and planned a greater and better San Francisco that is now more than a reality. A material triumph? Perhaps. But such triumphs are triumphs of the spirit, too. Without the spirit, the tangible reality cannot be born.

I

WAS SENTENCED in the lower courts of Boston the other day for a larceny offense to twenty days in jail and a fine of ten dollars. The irony of that sentence you will see if you read

My first burglary offense went to the jury on July 10, 1902. I received a sentence to five years' imprisonment. Upon my release I received ten dollars, a prison suit of clothing, and again the best wishes of the warden to "make good." On ten dollars.

A well-known shoe manufacturer of Boston had a beautiful home in the suburbs of the city. It was broken into at night. I was the candidate to stand trial for this offense. Without a defense counsel to plead my case, I went back to the Charlestown Prison from a sentence of six to eight years. But everything has an end, and once again I stood in the warden's office to receive the State's ten dollars and the warden's wishes to "make good."

Now the average warden has not much sentiment towards his charges. I believe every warden uses the same expression. So our parting was merely a brief formality. Make good on ten dollars.

The money Massachusetts gave me furnished me transportation to New York. The Bowery was my goal. There I met an old pal of mine, a "paperlayer," in the vernacular of the underworld, or, in other words, a forger. Together we let loose a score of bad

and blow!

1 See editorial comment.-The Editors.

In order to elude the authorities I enlisted in the army. But my career as a soldier ended abruptly with a two-year sentence at the military prison at Leavenworth. The army is a little more liberal with "conduct time" for good behavior. So in a year I received my discharge from that institution.

My liberty was of short duration. The New York authorities were at the outer gates to take me back to stand trial for the bad checks. A visit up the river for a few years under Warden Osborne's administration finally terminated, and again I stood in the warden's office and received my discharge and ten dollars and his admonition to "make good."

I have now become a fifth offender, for my last offense against society cost me a long sentence. I received my discharge the other day. The ten dollars the State of Massachusetts gave me has not as yet given me a new start in life.

Since my release I have done a little figuring. According to my calculation, I have accomplished thousands of dollars' worth of profitable work. For this I received fifty dollars from the States of Massachusetts and New York.

I have not told all this, obviously, with an idea of excusing myself. But it strikes me there is bad management in the way I have been treated.

Once out of jail, I was always up against a line-up that made it practically impossible for me to get and hold a job, because of the prejudice against an exconvict. In one place, the other workmen began taking their coats out of the washroom when they heard about me. I was headed naturally back by society toward crime, instead of encouraged to "make good." That is the injusticeand the fact that I never left prison with anything like a fair balance of pay for the work I had done behind the bars.

I hope that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of New York, that are so far advanced in many other things, will make it possible for discharged convicts to get a new start with sufficient cash to make good on.

S

CIENCE seems on the way to solving the problem of economic conflicts between nations for sources of certain vital raw materials with which diplomacy has been unable to deal. Science goes about the task, not by trying to find a way of dividing available supplies, but by creating new supplies.

Oil and rubber furnish two examples. They are necessities about which there have been endless difficulty and dispute. Lately there came news that the German Dye Trust had perfected a method for producing synthetic petroleum. But this alone-despite its interest to a nation of motor-car owners-might not have commanded American attention if coupled with it there had not been a report that the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey had formed a combination with the German trust. This showed that the process was of such practical value that the most powerful oil corporation wished to have a hand in its control and use. By the agreement the American concern acquired a share in the rights for making artificial petroleum, which thus may supplement the resources of natural petroleum the country possesses if they should show signs of exhaustion.

Not content with synthetic petroleum, the Germans have been at work on methods of making synthetic rubber. At the fiftieth anniversary of the German Chemical Manufacturers' Association recently, a speaker predicted that artificial rubber will soon enter world markets in competition with natural rubber. Methods developed so far have cost too much to be practical, but a new method was announced which simplified the process of uniting the elements of rubber found in coal tar. The German Dye Trust has applied for world patents.

If the German product proves equal to natural rubber and as cheap, it will be of great interest to the people of the United States. We use more than half

of the world output of crude rubber, and have to depend largely on British-controlled plantations in the East Indies and Malaya for our supply.

Go

OLD accumulated in the United States after the war is finding its way gradually into international use to put the finances of less fortunate nations on a firm basis. Brazil has negotiated a sale of bonds in our markets amounting to $41,500,000, of which $36,000,000 is to go to the Brazilian Government in the form of United States coin. Two gold shipments of $11,000,000 each have already been sent, and the balance is to be forwarded shortly. This is one of several such transactions by which our surplus of gold is being transferred to the credit of other nations, a second recent instance having been the sale of $15,000,000 in gold to the Bank of Poland to help stabilize the Polish currency.

ILSUDSKI, the Polish dictator, is after Lithuania-so Moscow will have it, but western Europe appears to remain. unconvinced.

Poland and Lithuania have been technically at war for some six years ever since the Polish General Zeligowski seized the city of Vilna. The Lithuanians wanted Vilna as their capital, but the Poles likewise laid claim to it. Since it lies on a main railway line and is a junction essential to Polish army strategy, the right of the stronger prevailed and Poland took it. Within the last few weeks Soviet spokesmen have declared that Poland was massing troops on the Lithuanian frontier and preparing to take the whole country, and also the Baltic port of Memel.

Poland has denied these charges. France, Poland's ally, has pointed out

through her Foreign Office that similar reports, current for the past six months, have been traced to German or Russian sources, and that differences between Lithuania and Poland are to come before the Council of the League of Nations in December. Consequently, Marshal Pilsudski would hardly choose this moment for a campaign against Lithuania, even if he had such a plan in mind at all. And it is to be recalled that it was Pilsudski who quieted trouble on the Lithuanian-Polish frontier last month, when quarrels had arisen over the treatment of Polish children in Lithuanian schools and Polish hotheads were proposing reprisals against Lithuanian children in Polish schools.

M

OUKHTAR BEY, the newly appointed first Ambassador from the Turkish Republic to the United States, is on his way to Washington. He is said to seek ratification of the Lausanne Treaty, rejected by Congress, as the main aim of his mission. At the same time a contract has been announced for the expenditure of $2,500,000 by the Turkish Government for American industrial equipment. This is to include construction of railroad shops for a new transportation line, to open up a rich agricultural and industrial region of Turkey and connect with the Bagdad Railway.

Nationalist Turkey is renewing relations with America in the most up-to-date style.

the Mexican and our own companies promise to double the amounts of their expenditures. Mexico plans to facilitate the passage of tourists at the border and to give them special attention during their stay. Probably few measures could do more to insure better relations in the future, as well as to increase Mexican resources, than such a plan to increase the number of visitors from the north.

made me give deeper thought to the question of education.

have no difficulty in making effective the point of view of the Allies and America regarding the policies essential to guarantee that Germany will pay her debts to the full extent of her capacity.

PARLIAMENT has always been a

synonym for dignity in Great Britain. But since the Labor Party secured the position of the second largest group in the House of Commons reports of parliamentary debates have been more diverting. A few days ago, former Labor Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald demanded a vote of censure of the Conservative Government for neglect of the unemployment situation. Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, President of the Board of Trade, attempted to answer. But the Laborites wanted Prime Minister Baldwin. Howling his spokesman down, they yelled: "We want the organ-grinder -not the monkey." The disorder ended in amusement when a Laborite took a mock vote of censure; but it served to show again the deep rift in British public life which Americans first saw fully revealed in the days of the coal strike two years ago.

remedies to offer. First, larger salaries, and therefore higher standards and keener competition for teachers. Less insistence upon bone-dry scholarship and more upon personality and character.

Of my own little college group, only one went into teaching. She was an amiable and complacent girl, grown rather less amiable but more complacent, daughter of a boarding-school principal who has literally never lived outside a school. Armed with a Ph.D., she now instructs youth in the same college from which she graduated. I should not care to place my daughter under her guidance; for she is not a woman, but a curiously dried mummy of the girl we used to know, with nothing to give but book knowledge.

By contrast, a friend who for some dozen years has earned a good living in journalism once tried to secure a parttime teaching position in a woman's college. To be sure, she did not boast the academic degree which-justly enough in most cases-is the test for college teaching. But she did have keen intelligence and valuable knowledge gained in the school of hard practical experience. A bespectacled gentleman eyed her excellent magazine articles with indifference, but inquired if she had an M.A. and whether she had done "ghosting."

"Ghosting?" inquired the puzzled journalist. "I never heard of it.”

The professor stared. "Never heard of ghosting?" he exclaimed. "And you claim to be a special-article writer?"

Discovery that she had been "ghosting" for ten years without knowing iti. e., writing interview articles to which public men signed their names-did not lessen his contempt, and her subsequent confession to only two years of college,

due to financial straits, put an abrupt end to the interview.

That brings me to my second remedy. Use sources outside academic life in the classroom. Make room in the crowded text-book schedules for talks by all kinds of men and women-business, professional, artistic, domestic. Not only permit, but encourage and persuade married women with the necessary qualifications to teach. And thus, little by little, allow a sense of reality to penetrate the hermetically sealed doors of our educational institutions, teaching girls that wisdom begins with one's self and cannot be found in books.

It is less for a change in curriculum that I argue though I believe that half my college study was completely wasted -than for a change in atmosphere, that so much more subtle and difficult, perhaps as yet impossible, element to se

cure.

A

ND that leads me to what is, I fear, my forlornest hope of all. Let women search their own hearts and admit what they find there. Let them mold their lives, not upon artificial standards of bygone feminists, but upon the honest weaknesses and the eternal strength of woman. Let them read and ponder well that fiercely reviled book "The Soul of Woman," so true in spirit, however erring in detail.

Perhaps some of you who spend your lives denying your own existence will turn upon the unimportant author of this article some of the frightened scorn with which you attacked Gina Lombroso. I answer, that I have stood where you stand. I too once turned deaf ears to the cries of that prisoner you will not release. Today I live in the truth of my own soul. All I wish for you is the same peace. Until you find it, I and other mothers I know wil! think long before we deliver our daughters into your dangerous hands.

E

VERY one who has had to do with the distribution of books during the last eight or ten years has been witness, if he chose to observe, to a turn in American interest. Judging from the books they have been reading, Americans have gone through the final stages to the end of the religious cult phase of adolescence and have entered the philosophy of life stage.

Ten years ago the worship of physical health became almost a National religion, threatening to displace that of material success. Some of its propagandists, like the more successful missionaries to the foreign field, sought to fuse the best elements of both creeds, and

This creed, again, led naturally into the next. "What use is health if we have festering complexes? Analysis cannot alter personality. How do we get this way?"

To these clamoring for new revelations the scientists were sent. They were hard leaders, and their followers went about in sackcloth and ashes, beating upon their breasts because they were miserable sinners on account of their glands and their environment and their choice of parents, and there was nothing that could be done about it. It was the doctrine of original sin, and there was

no atonement.

method, good will, and breathing exer

cises.

Like all religions, the cult of physical well-being had its schismatic sects. The orthodox subscribed to the tenets of life extension institutes, fed upon bran bread and sacramental coffee, genuflected matutinally to the sound of music. They were saved by works. The heterodox looked to salvation by faith. By faith they removed mountains of flesh and went about with shining morning faces. As heterodoxy gained, it slipped naturally into another sort of faith healing, from concern for physical health into concern for mental. Interest in intestinal obstructions gave way tc interest in psychic ones. Complications fell before complexes. Psychoanalysis was God, and Jung and Freud his prophets. Jung and Freud for a while. This was a popular creed because it was, for the layman, largely conversational. It had its martyrssome in very truth. But mostly, it had its minor prophets. Presently there was no congregation in its churches. Every one was clamoring to get into the pulpit.

erature. The presses, the bookstalls, the libraries of the country were flooded with it. "Diet and Health," "Health and the Human Spirit," "The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science," "Outwitting Our Nerves," "The Conquest of Fear," Tridon, Hinckle, Coué,

99

your powder dry," or "it will all come out in the wash," or "ich dien," only better and more of it. And the seekers looked for something that could be read about and studied, because books which teach have the property of an awful power, their authors the necromancer's uncanny omniscience.

Nothing has astonished the book business more than the colossal sale last year of "The Story of Philosophy," by Will Durant. Nothing should have surprised it less if it had followed the trend of American "serious reading." "The Story of Philosophy" did what all good school-books ought to do enticed its readers on to the sources. The modern philosophers (Bertrand Russell, Santayana, Will Durant himself, whose book "Transition" is beginning to appear on best-selling lists) may expect new printings, and the convenient editions of the classics are beginning to be bought, presumably to be read.

ality," "Heredity and Environment,' "Why We Behave Like Human Beings" -these books sold in vast numbers, were studied and discussed with tragic avidity by an unhappy generation seeking after a sign.

The progressively depressing effect of these cults led, as adolescent religious experiments often do, to atheism. And the next step was the one usually reached in the sophomoric period, the demand for a philosophy of life. In spite of disorganized physical or mental health, very much in spite of heredity and environment, "life goes on," as our novelists assure us. Some means of making it endurable must be found. Philosophically-philosophy. Never mind what philosophy means, what is wanted is something like "trust in God and keep

books. But one inevitably watches for the moment when this public of seeking readers will come to the end of the sophomore years and conclude that salvation is not to be learned. Any man's creed may be believed, any man's philosophy accepted with the brain. But unless it is felt it is footless. Feeling is not to be found in books studied as facts. It is only when the contents of a book leaves the schoolmaster's hand and enters the reader's heart that it begins to be real to him. Not books to study; books to read. Books which, by providing by means as diverse as are the hearts of their readers an escape from the need of a palliative philosophy, a renewal of gusto for living, fulfill what a supreme philosopher called the function of literature.