Reich has believed that comic operas are very ancient, and in a book published twenty-five years ago he suggested that something of the sort existed in the days of the Greco-Roman Empire.

Only lately, however, has he been able to find a papyrus which supports his views. It contains the cues for the actors and the orchestra, and somewhat suggests a modern revue. It was originally discovered among the numerous papyri unearthed at Oxyrhynchus, but the work of deciphering it has occupied many years. The heroine of the opera is a beautiful young lady named Charition, who falls into the hands of an Indian king, a wholly comic figure, after a shipwreck. She is kept a prisoner in a temple on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Eventually her brother comes to rescue her, gives an exceedingly lively banquet in honor of the guards, and makes the King drunk so he can escape with his sister. The whole suggests a parody of Iphigenia in Tauris. The Indian king is a burlesque monarch who speaks a grotesque 'Indian' language invented by the dramatist for the occasion. He enters singing:

'Panumbretikatatemanuanbretuneni,'

to which his entire court replies in solemn antistrophe:

'Panumbretikatatemanuanbretuneni Parakumbretikatemanuanbretuneni.'

It is interesting to note that Professor Reich is something more than an alert student of dramatic history. He has also been professionally connected with the modern stage, and Max Reinhardt followed his suggestions in staging many of Offenbach's operas. He has also influenced the mounting of Shakespearean comedy in Germany.

DICKENS AND THE GNATS

A SPECIAL correspondent of the Westminster Gazette has discovered an old man who knew Charles Dickens well, living in a medieval almshouse in Kent. The old fellow is Mr. Thomas Lockyer, quiries of the correspondent he gave now eighty-six years old. To the inthis account of his association with the great novelist:

I used to see a great deal of Mr. Dickens round Higham and Cobham, but I never looked on him as anything out of the ordinary. He was a nice sort of chap, and would crack a joke with anybody. He used to walk about with his big slate-colored dog, and was often accompanied by a

woman.

There was no pride about him. I often saw him sitting in the woods and in the park, writing. I used to say to him, 'Hullo, Mr. Dickens; be the gnats troublesome to-day?' And he would answer, 'I 'm rubbing a little oil on the backs of my hands to keep 'em away. They don't like the oil.'

For two winters when I was a young man he came over to the Leather Bottle every other Tuesday evening to read some of his works to us. Why? I don't know, but I know he interested a lot of us on a good many nights when we might have been gallivanting about the streets and roads.

Fifty or sixty of us used to go to the Leather Bottle to hear him read. We came from all the parishes round. Mr. Dickens used to sit in an armchair, which is still there, and he read to us out of Pickwick and made us all laugh. He also amused us with Scrooge, but he also made our flesh creep and made us feel sorry for Tiny Tim.

Yes, 't was wonderful, but, you know, we did n't think much of Mr. Dickens at the time. You see he was not a very big man, but he had a fine head with a great handful of beard. After the readings he used to walk home to Gadshill, two miles away.

I played cricket with him. He was good for any sort of game. He got up matches between the youngsters of Higham and Shorne, and always played for Higham, his own parish.

Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, by Oscar Wilde. The complete version of De Profundis. Translated into German by Max Meyerfeld. Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1925.

now

A PASSING reference to 'a kind of apology for his life, a manuscript amounting to about forty-five thousand words,' in the Dictionary of National Biography's account of Oscar Wilde was the first intimation that the public had of the existence of the book or rather, the fragment of a book known as De Profundis. Not until 1905 was anything more learned about the manuscript, which still lay hidden in the jealous custody of Wilde's literary executor, Robert Ross. In January and February of that year a German translation of the abbreviated De Profundis was published by Herr Max Meyerfeld, the present translator of the complete version, in the Neue Rundschau, and shortly afterward appeared the English De Profundis as we now know it. The title had been supplied by Robert Ross, and his excisions were apparent in abrupt breaks in thought and the rows of dots which starred the pages. Ross had been at pains to conceal the fact that the manuscript was a letter, and for this purpose he had even gone so far as to introduce minor changes in wording. When Wilde's complete works appeared in 1908, however, Ross admitted in the dedication that De Profundis was 'a letter to a friend not myself,' and in his German translation of 1909 Herr Meyerfeld explained that this friend was Lord Alfred Douglas, who later wrote Oscar Wilde and Myself. In 1909 Ross presented the manuscript to the British Museum, stipulating that it was not to be published until 1960. He did this because the complete letter is filled with bitter reproaches which, though in no sense scandalous, made it seem desirable to hold the complete manuscript as a confidential document until after the death of all persons mentioned in it.

In 1912, however, the English journalist Arthur Ransome printed a critical study of Wilde which confined itself to his works, touching upon his life only as it related to them. One passage, however, though it did not make any mention of his name, was considered an insult by Lord Alfred Douglas, who promptly brought suit for slander. The author, in order to prove his case, fell back on the manuscript, which was brought forth from the Museum and read in open court. His attorneys would have been satisfied with the pertinent passages only; but Lord Alfred's counsel insisted that once the manuscript had been brought into court the whole eighty pages must be read, their object being to discredit the dead author's testimony by the manifold moodiness which his letter revealed. Thus it came about that the whole was read, and the public thus learned from the newspaper reports the general nature of its contents. The court rendered judgment against the plaintiff, and the manuscript went back to the Museum's safe-keeping.

Now, thirty-five years in advance of the complete English version which will probably be published in 1960, comes this German translation, bearing all the earmarks of authority and presumably made from a copy of the original which has found its way from Ross's hands into Herr Meyerfeld's. The title, Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, is that which Wilde himself suggested. From it the place which the English De Profundis occupies in the whole can be easily estimated. Roughly speaking, it is about one third, mainly chosen from the more general reflections the central portions of the book, and omitting entirely the more personal beginning and end. The letter opens thus:

should not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness, and contempt should forever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me; and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference, you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.

I have no doubt that in this letter which I have to write of your life and mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness, and of bitter things that may be turned into joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison, where the day, no less than the night, is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother as you did with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter and soothe you back into self-complacency or conceit, you will be completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself, you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I 'attribute unworthy motives' to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive is an intellectual aim.

That you were 'very young' when our friendship began? Your defeat was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood, with its delicate bloom, its clear blue light, its joy of innocence and expectation, you had left far behind you. With very swift and running feet you had passed from romance to realism. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for allowing an intellectual friendship, and a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realize that an artist, and especially such an artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, — requires intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude. You admired my work when it was finished; you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them; you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished. But you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact, when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative. And with but few intervals you were, I regret to say, by my side always.

One does not ordinarily think of Wilde, the elegant dandy, as an apostle of plain living and high thinking, yet there is one

passage in which he praises that very standard, and observes:

One of the most delightful dinners I remember ever having had is one Robbie and I had together in a little Soho café, which cost about as many shillings as my dinners to you used to cost pounds. Out of my dinner with Robbie came the first and best of all my dialogues. Idea, title, treatment, mode, everything was struck out at a 3 fr. 50 c. table d'hôte.

Sometimes there is a picture of prison life, as in this paragraph:

And if you had a spark of imagination in you, you would know there is not a man of those that were kind to me in my prison life, from the warder that used to wish me 'Good morning' and 'Good night' (no part of his prescribed duties) down to the common policemen who in their rough, friendly way tried to comfort me as I went to the bankruptcy court and back with my soul in bitter need, or down to the poor thief who recognized me as we made the rounds in the prison court at Wandsworth and, with that hoarse prison voice that comes from long involuntary silence, whispered to me the words, ‘I am sorry for you; it is harder for your kind than for us' not one of all these, I say, before whom you should be too proud to kneel and wipe the dust from his shoes.

suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement. I felt like the snakecharmer when by his charm he makes the cobra rise before the particolored cloth or the bamboo wand and spread its hood as commanded, swaying back and forth in the air as a plant sways placidly in the stream. To me they were brightly gilded snakes, their poison a part of their perfection. I did not know that they would attack me to the piping and for the payments of another. I am in no wise ashamed to have known them, for they were very interesting; but what I am ashamed of is the frightful Philistine atmosphere into which I was dragged. My business as an artist was with Ariel. I set myself to wrestle with Caliban.

Many pages after the last paragraph of the English De Profundis, the complete letter closes thus:

What the world and what I myself conceived as my future I lost irreparably when I let myself be hurried into the suit against your father. Indeed, I had lost it long before that. My past lies before me. I must bring myself to the point where I can look at it with other eyes, and I must bring God there too. And I cannot do that if I leave you unregarded, treat you shabbily, eulogize or slander. That I can only attain if I accept it as an inevitable part of the development of my life and being. Meanwhile, in all that I suffer, I bow my head. How far I am from the true quiet of the soul, this letter shows you clearly, with its contradictory, uncertain moods, its contempt and its bitterness, its striving and incapacity to transform that striving into fact. But do not forget in what a terrible school I sit at my task. And imperfect and incomplete though I am, you may still gain much from me. You wanted once to learn from me the joy of life and the joy of art. Perhaps I am called to teach you something far more wonderful the meaning of sorrow, and its beauty. Still your friend,

OSCAR WILDE

--

Ludovic Naudeau is a veteran French journalist, now on the staff of the Temps, whose adventures would and as a matter of fact do - fill several volumes. He was under fire in Port Arthur during the Japanese bombardment, and was later made prisoner by the Mikado's troops during the battle of Mukden. In 1918 he was captured again, this time by the Bolsheviki. In 1922 he was special correspondent of his newspaper in Rome. M. Naudeau is the author of numerous books, among them Benito Mussolini, Le Japon moderne, En prison sous la terreur russe, and a novel, Plaisir du Japon. His new novel is to be called Châtiment et châtiment. As for the present article, it may be as well to add that he is a lifelong student of world affairs who speaks German also English and Russian.

Mrs. Asquith is just our old friend Mrs. Asquith though nowadays she is also the Countess of Oxford and Asquith. Hilaire Belloc, Catholic apologist, friend of Chesterton, poet, historian, military critic, and several other things, looks with dark distrust on modern science and most of its teachings. In his present article he indulges in some ribald jeers at that popular hero, the Nordic. This is not surprising, however, for Mr. Belloc once so far forgot himself as to ridicule the bones of our anthropoid ancestors, and even their guardian angel, a certain Mr. Wells. The author of the companion article is a British physician who has given up practice in order to study and popularize the results of the most recent medical and biological investigations. His name, unfortunately, we are not allowed to reveal.

Henri de Kerillis, former officer of the French army and African adventurer, continues to shed light on the Dark Continent in a further article. Willingham Franklin Rawnsley's mother's cousin married Alfred Lord Tennyson. Our readers may work out the exact degree of relationship to suit

themselves. D. H. Lawrence abandoned school-teaching for literature, his only resemblance to Mr. H. G. Wells - repeated reference to whom seems inevitable in this page this month. Mr. Lawrence is a novelist and poet, a member of the Imagist group, and like everyone else in the world has written a book about psychoanalysis. As his writings are often regarded as unduly frank, we hasten to assure our readers that "The Hopi Snake-Dance' is almost obstreperously moral.

No writer in South America is abler or commands a wider hearing than the Argentine, Manuel Ugarte. As a journalist, he has leanings toward socialism of a not very violent kind. He is likewise an ardent opponent of imperialism and an advocate of South American union. As a novelist he is more concerned with the interpretation of Latin-American life than with political polemics. His stories include Cuentos Argentinos, Una tarde de otoño, and Cuentos de la Pampa.

If everyone were not perfectly well aware that the title of the 'Gloomy Dean' is more or less a joke, the Very Reverend W. R. Inge's strictures on the 'Spoon-fed Age' might seem to give some reason for it. Still, how can one expect the Dean of St. Paul's, with his Cathedral likely to come tumbling down about his ears at any moment, to take a cheerful view of his contemporaries?

As a 'Sister' in the Soldatenheimdienst of the German Army operating with the Turks in Palestine, Fräulein Grete Diel did work essentially like the Y. M. C. A.'s welfare work in our own service. When the retreat of the German Oriental Army began in the spring of 1918, she was on duty at Nablus, also known as Sichem, where field clubs for officers and soldiers had just been established. Her story is one of the few human records of this kind that have come through from the other side of the fighting-line.