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LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS

THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA IN
DANGER?

LONDON is not the only city of the Old World that is having trouble with its historic structure. Of late Pisa has been seriously concerned for the future fate of its celebrated leaning tower. The most alarming rumors gained credence as a result of an article by Mario Canavari, Professor of Geology in the University of Pisa, in the Grande Illustrazione d'Italia, last January. Besides being a geologist, who might reasonably be supposed to know all about rock foundations, subsoils, and other topics of importance when ancient structures are under consideration, he had been a member of the commission appointed to examine the tower in 1923. At that time the report was, 'No change since 1914.' Professor Canavari, however, refused to believe the tower was safe.

The town fathers of Pisa promptly appointed another commission. Competent authorities in Pisa assert that although the tower has probably never been quite safe since it first began to lean, in the eleventh century, it is as safe now as it ever was. The 1925 experts confirm this by declaring there is no immediate danger, but they advise draining off the water which now fills the soil and favors further sinkage. The top of the tower is now fourteen feet out of the perpendicular.

Concern about the leaning tower seems to be almost as periodical as seventeen-year locusts. About a century ago someone in Pisa grew uneasy, and excavations were made at the base of the tower to permit examination of its foundations. Water promptly rose

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FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF 'CARMEN' ITALIAN papers are devoting special attention to the fiftieth anniversary of Bizet's Carmen, which was first produced on March 3, 1875. The composer's letters show, however, that he had been thinking about the opera for three years previously, ever since the unfavorable reception of his Djamileh, in which strict critics professed to discern traces of the influence of that iconoclastic fellow, Richard Wagner. Bizet took the matter to heart and decided to be conservative in the future; but, strange as it may seem to modern ears, even dear old Carmen at first appeared too much of an innovation.

French critics found a Wagnerian taint in it, too, and Du Locle, the director of the Opéra Comique, had moral scruples about the libretto, which led him to advise a Cabinet Minister to attend a rehearsal to make sure it was fit for family parties to witness! That

same prudish M. Du Locle - not all prudes are Anglo-Saxon - described the music as 'cochinchinoise,' and averred that he could n't for the life of him make head or tail of it.

Carmen did not reach its hundredth performance until 1883. The first performance met with an icy reception, and there was no real triumph until December 1883. Between that date and 1920 there have been 1006 performances in Paris alone.

THE HALF-DOZEN BEST TUNES

AN enterprising Englishman, who conceals his identity behind the initials B. T., doubtless because he fears the wrath of contemporary composers, has made up a list of the 'Half-dozen Best Tunes.' Whoever he is, this daring individual is clearly a lover of melody, who looks upon harmony as a mere musical sidetrack. He complains bitterly in the columns of T. P.'s Weekly that 'tunes are to-day out of fashion among the younger composers,' and points out that 'all the music that has lived is melody,' while experiments in orchestration and cacophony, valuable though they may be to musicans, are perilously mortal.

And so B. T. has been trying an experiment. He went to four London literary men, none of them blessed with musical gifts, and asked each independently to make up a list of the six best tunes in the world. The strange thing is that the replies were fairly unanimous. From all four men he got only twelve titles, of which the following, in the order named, were the most. popular:

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One man wanted "The Lass with the Delicate Air' included; another wanted 'Old Hundred.' A Scotchman asked for 'Loch Lomond,' and the Welshman of the quartette patriotically demanded 'Aberystwyth.' Still another asked for Haydn's 'Austrian Hymn,' and one unfortunate individual, who was covered with derision, asked for two of Verdi's melodies.

'We all loved Verdi,' said B. T., 'and because we loved and respected him, we could not subject him to competition with Handel and Mozart.'

THE RETURN OF THE SICILIAN NATIVE

Two Sicilian dramatists, Savarino and Sclafani, have made a great success with a new play, Mister John, which narrates the adventures of a prosperous immigrant returning to his Sicilian home. 'Mister John,' the hero, began life as simple Giovanni in a little hamlet, but urged by ambition he emigrated to America, married his employer's daughter as all successful young men used to do, and became a prosperous family-man.

The fun starts when wealthy Mr. John conceives the unhappy idea of taking his family to visit his old father and mother, Sicilian peasants who have not grown any less conservative with advancing years. His daughters are now marriageable young ladies. His wife is still attractive. All three have been brought up to American standards, whose application to Sicily ends in turning the heads of a number of honest husbands and innocent youths, and transforming the village into a hornets' nest.

The gossip at length reaches Mr. John, who endeavors to put his foot down in the good old heavy-parent style, only to find his family laughing in his face. To save that same face, exit John hastily in the Columbus

LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS

direction, taking family and his old parents with him. The old people don't want to go, but they cannot leave their boy.

The Sicilian actor Angelo Musco is said to have made a great success in the play.

A 'NEGRO' MONTHLY

A MONTHLY magazine devoted to the Negro is the latest appearance in the Parisian journalistic world. 'Negro,' however, let us hasten to explain, is not a term applied to French citizens of African descent, but is Parisian slang phrase for unsuccessful writers who live by selling their manuscripts to wealthy ignoramuses who want to appear literary but don't know how to write.

Organization being the watchword of the day, even these pariahs of the pen have made up their minds to consolidate like the representatives of any other profession. The monthly is replete with advertisements like the following:

Author of five completely finished plays, ready for the stage, would sell same singly or together. Prices moderate. A business proposition, especially suitable for a wealthy young man wishing to gain a name.

A writer in the Italian newspaper, La Stampa, announces that he intends to find out whether the 'Negro' syndicate also furnishes themes for newspaper articles'in which case,' he says, 'I am going to subscribe in a hurry.'

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ancient skulls and skulls of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Morning Post gives the following summary of his remarks:

Measurements made on living Englishmen led to the belief that the head-form had changed and was changing, becoming slightly shorter and slightly wider. So far as concerned the brain-capacity of the skull, there was no evidence of increase, and from the limited data at one's disposal one must infer that the people who occupied Western Europe at the close of the Ice Age stood distinctly above their successors of to-day in

the matter of brain-size.

Until ten years ago he had been of the opinion that the evidence from England showed that modern man had ceased to

evolve. A minute comparison of a series of ancient skulls and of skulls of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had convinced him that evolution was now at work on our bodies. The chief change was to be seen in the size and shape of the palate; the roof of the mouth tended to become reduced in size and narrower. The bony entrance to the nose showed alterations. It was getting narrower, and its lower margin was rising up so as to form a sharp bony sill.

The jaws were receding and the bony framework of the nose was becoming more prominent. The eye-sockets were changed in form; the lower margin or sill of the orbit tended to sink downward in the face, thus increasing the distance between the lower and upper margins of the orbit. The orbits were becoming narrower from side to side; the breadth across the upper part of the face was becoming less; the cheek-bones were losing their prominence, and there was a tendency for the face to grow narrower and longer.

These changes were confined to about thirty per cent of the modern population, but the evidence he had gathered pointed to an increasing frequency of these characters during recent centuries.

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stirred up in England by the news that the Prince of Wales has accepted the presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which is to hold its 1926 meeting in Oxford. The British Association is, as everybody knows, one of the most famous scientific organizations in the world, and the annual address of its President is always looked forward to as one of the important scientific pronouncements of the year. Almost invariably, therefore, the President has been a scientific man of great eminence.

Among the few exceptions have been the Prince's great-grandfather, Prince Albert, who presided over the Association on its Aberdeen meeting in 1859. At another Oxford meeting Lord Salisbury presided. However, these noblemen were not quite in the same position as the Prince of Wales. Prince Albert had some scientific pretensions, however mild. Lord Salisbury, assisted by Lord Rayleigh, actually did write and deliver a scientific lecture. The Prince of Wales, however, knows nothing of atoms and electrons, or fossils or insects, or anything of the sort, and pretends to know nothing.

Consequently, controversies rage be

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tween one school of scientific men who have a fine old crusty distaste for amateurs, and the other party which has a very British and very human liking for princes.

THE COOLIDGE PEDIGREE

THERE are some people in England who simply will not believe that President Coolidge's ancestors came over to England with William the Conqueror. Hence this from the Manchester Guardian:

High heraldic authorities here do not seem to be impressed by the Paris story that after twelve years' labor Professor President Coolidge's ancestors was among Guy Coolidge has discovered that one of the knights of William the Conqueror, and that the American Coolidges came from the ancient family of Coolidge of Cambridgeshire, who were settled in England before the Conquest. 'You can count on your fingers the families of all the English-speaking countries of the world authentically descended from before the Conquest,' said the authority consulted. By 'authentically descended' he refers to those possessing by the Heralds' College, passed and signed genealogies supplied at great cost and labor

by the official Board of Examiners there. The authority, after consulting the monster volume wherein are prototypes of all the legitimate armorial adornments, handed back the Coolidge coat of arms without comment.

It was pointed out to him that Professor Coolidge had traced the evolution of the

name from the reign of Edward I, when William de Coulinge appeared in the rolls as a Cambridgeshire landowner. He promised to look up the matter, but remarked with dignity, 'Here we cannot serve over the counter.'

BOOKS ABROAD

Fragment of a Novel, written by Jane Austen (January to March 1817). Now first printed from the Manuscript. London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1925. 78. 6d.

[Augustine Birrell in the New Statesman]

A Fragment of a Novel (Sanditon), though in no sense juvenile, is not in the least joyful; and though highly provocative of laughter, the merriment is not the laughter of either Pickwick or Gargantua.

To the lovers of Jane Austen, now to be found scattered all over the English-reading world, the laughter this Fragment must provoke, and the admiration it cannot fail to excite by the pungency of a familiar wit, and the inimitable happiness of its phraseology, will be found to lie too near to the fountain of tears to make the reading of it a cheerful pastime. Melancholy must of necessity brood over its handful of pages. Yet we are glad it has been printed as it has been.

Those of us who are old enough to recall the appearance in 1871 of Mr. Austen Leigh's Memoir of his aunt (we procured our copy two years later in exchange for twenty-one pennies) will not need to be reminded that it contained, after the admirable Memoir, not only 'Lady Susan' and 'The Watsons,' but a sketch extending over nineteen pages, of the dramatis personæ of this very Fragment of a Novel, with copious quotations from the manuscript itself.

It could never be easy to give a description of a Fragment, proceeding from the pen or pencil of such a writer as Jane Austen; and copious as the quotations were, Mr. Austen Leigh failed, or seemed to us in 1871 to fail, in presenting any true impression of the manuscript that in his judgment could not in its entirety be given to the public. He should, we think, have printed it as it was written, or left it altogether alone. We have now the Fragment as it fell from the lap of the dying woman.

The editor is to be greatly commended for the taste that dictated to him the propriety of printing the author's manuscript 'as nearly as possible in the last form it attained.' 'It may,' so he writes, 'be thought pedantic to reproduce irregularities which the author would not have wished to retain, but it seemed more important to avoid another danger. To have smoothed out the manuscript into a specious semblance of finality would have been to prejudice in some degree the question how far it did in fact repre

sent the author's final intention. This edition, printed as it is, is open to no such objection. It is, for critical purposes, virtually a facsimile of all that Miss Austen wrote and did not erase.

Reading this Fragment, thus reprinted, cannot but have a solemnizing effect, despite the triviality of its incidents. The misspellings, the strange contractions, the capital letters, the odd way of writing people's ages, 'Miss Diana P. was about 4 & 30,' and many other quaintnesses, all produce the true effect - namely, that we are handling not merely a Fragment, but the rough draft of one.

None the less, it is the rough draft of a Fragment from the hand that wrote Emma. With the fate of Mr. Austen Leigh in 1871 before us, we will make no attempt to describe the dramatis personæ of Sanditon, or to give extracts from it; enough to say that, tiny as it is, it is full of inimitable wit, and here and there fills the reader's mind full to overflowing with that divine glow of complete satisfaction so rarely bestowed upon the members of that longsuffering but still enduring tribe.

Queer Fish, by John C. Goodwin. London: Hutchinson, 1925. 18s.

[Daily Telegraph]

Most people go through life seeing very little that lies right before them; but it is the special function of the journalist to have eyes for everything, both in the daylight and in the dark. However 'queer' the catch, all is fish that comes to his net; and the wider the net is cast the more competent the fisherman. Mr. John C. Goodwin, for example, has a fine catholicity of sympathy, and his book is packed with the raw material of human life. 'By tramping London's streets,' to use his own words, 'her open spaces, her wharves, her alleys, and the haunts of strange men; by hurrying with the hurriers and loafing with the loafers, by talking with the good, the not so good, and the good for nothing,' he has gathered a very various harvest of understanding and interpretation. His eye is keen, his heart is generous, and he writes uncommonly well. So well, indeed, that every now and then he seems to be on the point of diving into the golden waters of pure literature; and then some desolating phrase, like 'to ascertain my wishes in matters alcoholic,' or 'Lordy, how time flies,' suddenly bumps the imagination once more

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