ters percolate all the way through. They trickle, diluted and sullied, even in the pages of the cheap magazine story and the cheaper feuilleton. The labors particularly of those whom we might call the Humble-minded Masters such as Jane Austen and Chekhov in literature, and Forain, Steinlen, and Sickert in paintingmust have supplied an antidote to the bane of dreariness in innumerable places and hearts. How much easier to suffer fools gladly if, all the while, you are collecting their fatuities to pass on to some chosen friend! How nearly you come to loving your enemies when you can afterward present them in mimicry or take them off in delicate caricature! What a warm glow when you have garnered some new subtlety of foolishness or of wickedness that might take its place with credit on the page of a masterpiece! Besides, what of us who are ourselves, too often, bores? Possibly not mothers alone, but all human creatures, can count, at least once in their lives, upon being regarded by their fellows as 'in an interesting condition.' It is quite certain that everyone can count, at one time or another, upon being regarded as a bore. Then how grateful should we be that in our boringness we may yet furnish some of the raw material for humor, satire, literary output! Instead of being avoided as much as possible by those who come in daily contact with us, we may actually be sought. We may sun ourselves unconsciously in their appreciation, lend ourselves to the top of our bent to supplying matter for their later répétition générale. What an addition to the common happiness! But to return to my discontented friend. What it comes to is this. There are several ways of looking at one's fellows, according to which one in evitably finds them interesting or uninteresting. There is the detached way of the artist and of the true gossip, as who should say, 'What can I create out of him, or what can I learn of his true being?' There is the personal way 'Am I going to like him, or he me?' And there is the semidetached way, which includes, 'Am I going to get anything out of him, or is he going to try to get anything out of me?' As things are, these three are often mixed. They become quite messily involved as soon as one person is introduced to another as 'interesting.' If, therefore, you want to queer the pitch between two of your friends, all you have to do is to tell each one beforehand that the 'interestingness' of the other is the reason of your bringing them together. There is only one worse you can go, which is to tell each that the other is going to be 'so interested' to meet him. Even if it be true that either of the persons concerned is interesting to anyone but yourself, the effect will be to make both, anyhow for the occasion, the very reverse to one another. People cannot be interesting to order, and a meeting with the most truly interesting man on earth may easily be a dismal failure. Perhaps it is a word which, in its present application, should disappear from our vocabulary. Let us, anyhow, use it only in its strictest sense. Let us say, 'He interests me,' or 'He might interest you,' 'He is a man who has had an interesting life,' or 'He has a nature interesting because of its unusual combination of qualities.' Or, better still, let us leave his record to speak for itself. It is well, among other things, to remember that in the case of an attractive man or a beautiful woman the epithet 'interesting' is never applied except as an afterthought. LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS AN UNPOLITICAL LOCARNO SPIRIT DIPLOMATIC Conferences in Alpine villages, Riviera winter-resorts, and the great capitals, make a loud noise that sounds not unlike international goodwill, and no doubt these gatherings of statesmen have other important effects that those revealed by the acquisition of knighthoods and cabinet positions. The official work of peace, like that of war, is probably the responsibility of political minds and the function of political mechanisms. But perhaps it is true of peace as it is of war that the unofficial work must be done by other than political agencies. In Europe at the moment, for example, one may wonder whether a certain number of mere literary men and artists are not doing more, in a quiet and inconspicuous way, for the cause of international understanding than all the officeholders on all the State pay-rolls of the Eastern Hemisphere. Consider the results accomplished in this direction by the free trade that prevails in dramatic activities throughout the continent. Perhaps Mr. Shaw's Saint Joan, Mr. Galsworthy's Loyalties, and Mr. Maugham's Rain are not the three greatest English plays of the century; but how can the theatregoing Berliners who have seen them all latterly fail to come away with a healthier sense of the English character than they could get from any of their newspapers? Signor Pirandello may be rather an artisan than an artist, as some critics aver, but can he have done a less telling work for Italy last summer in Germany than Signor Mussolini has done this winter in Rome? M. Firmin Gémier is conceivably an officious visionary; it remains likely that his project for a Theatrical League of Nations - even if it never materializes - will have had an effect on the international atmosphere like that of a refreshing thundershower on a sultry day. The stage, indeed, is already an unofficial organ of internationalism that functions without troublesome councils and without the voluntary aloofness of any potential member. But it is not the only channel through which the waters of intellectual and artistic reciprocity flow. In every European country there are publishers -Mr. Jonathan Cape in England, M. Grasset in Paris, and Herr Fischer in Berlin are examples who contribute to the cause of peace the weighty donation of familiarizing their readers with the best work of foreign authors in translation, and they are abetted by critics like Edmond Jaloux in France, Adriano Tilgher in Italy, and Salvador de Madariaga in Spain, whose literary culture is in the best sense Pan-European, and whose views of literature are proportionately overarching. It is such publishers and such critics who have made men like John Galsworthy, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann international figures, with almost as many readers abroad as they have at home. The Forsyte Saga has been one of the best-sellers of the season in Germany. Does that fact not bode quite as well for Anglo-German relations as the reception given to Stresemann and Luther in London? The Turin daily, La Stampa, is publishing a series of articles on contemporary English novelists that will possibly do more for the understanding of England in Italy than even the settlement of the Italian debt in London. The publication of a tale by Unamuno in the Neue Merkur may partially counteract some of the ill-feeling aroused in Germany by Spain's demand for a seat on the League Council. Poland and Czechoslovakia may have political enemies all over the continent, but Reymont and Čapek are too well known throughout Europe to allow fundamental doubts about the Polish and Czech spirit to gain ground. The internationalism of literature has the advantage over political internationalism that it is a matter of imaginative sympathy and understanding, not of tariff concessions and dotted lines. It is to be hoped, in this connection, that the habit of international visiting will grow in the esteem of literary men. Signs are not wanting to indicate that it is already growing. Paris has recently been the hostess of the German critic and traveler, Alfred Kerr, and of the novelist Thomas Mann. The French literary scholar, Bernard Fay, has been giving lectures in Berlin, and records his pleasant impressions of that city in the columns of the Vossische Zeitung. Is it not possible that the fruits of such visits may be as abundant as those of the sessions at which M. Briand and Herr Stresemann beam at each other across the table? What may not Ernst Toller have accomplished for Germany during his stay in London early in the year? These literary ambassadors fortunately enough have no official status and no official rewards, but the effects of their diplomacy may be none the less far-reaching for all that. HUMOR IN MUSIC 'IN a sense, no doubt, it may be contended that there is no such thing as humor in music,' says Mr. H. A. Scott, the music critic of the Westminster Gazette, 'and certainly it is true that so far as instrumental music is concerned the humor alleged is more often read into it by the listener than inherent in the music itself. Music may be gay, bright, and vivacious, certainly, and induce a corresponding state of feeling in its hearer; but this does not necessarily imply humor. Music can no more convey a joke than it can tell a story without the aid of words. 'Yet even instrumental music is not incapable of humorous effects, and sometimes one is tempted to say that it is really capable of genuine humor -as, for instance, in many of Beethoven's more rollicking passages, which in their unexpectedness, bizarrerie, and general whimsicality do convey an unmistakable suggestion of jocosity. Again, when, in the "Pastoral Symphony," Beethoven makes his bassoon play after the manner of a village performer, amusement is always excited though in this case probably only on the part of those who happen to know what is intended by the music. 'How largely, indeed, the appreciation of such instrumental facetiæ depends upon the listener is illustrated by the diverse interpretations that have been placed upon an equally famous passage in another of Beethoven's symphonies namely, that toward the end of the first movement of the "Eroica," where the horns make what sounds or, at any rate, used to sound -like a manifestly false entry. All music-lovers know the passage and relish it as one of the most characteristic ever written by Beethoven. But whereas some regard it as a joke of the first water, others as, for instance, the late Sir George Grove-are chiefly struck by its poetry and pathos. And this is a danger that is apt to attend all attempts at instrumental humor. 'Certainly the humorous and quasihumorous effects achieved by eccentricities of instrumentation can hardly be accepted as proving the possibilities of humor in music. To raise a smile by the employment of the bassoon, say, or the horn, or the drum, in an eccentric passage is doubtless easy enough. But the humor in this case resides in the queer sound of the instrument rather than in the music itself. Very rarely the latter possesses what can be regarded as an element of genuine humor, though now and again such music is written. Some of Beethoven's achievements in this way have been mentioned above, and Richard Strauss, to cite a more modern instance, has done the same thing more than once. "Then, again, there is humor of a purely academic kind, so to say, such as that derived from the performers being made to play out of tune, to play wrong notes, with exaggerated expression, and so forth. A famous work of this class is Mozart's so-called "Peasants' Symphony," in which a performance of a village orchestra is burlesqued and you have all sorts of blunders perpetrated by this and that instrument the horn playing a solo passage all wrong, the first violin attempting a cadenza and coming to grief, and so on. But this sort of musical jesting can, of course, hardly be cited as evidence of the possibility of humor in music as such. "The introduction of imitations of natural and other sounds constitutes another phase of the humorous in music. The bird-notes introduced by Beethoven in the slow movement of the "Pastoral" are, of course, a classical instance under this head; and any number of other examples could be cited, from the realistic "hee-haw" of Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" music (in reference, of course, to Bottom with his ass's head) an effect, this, anticipated by Bach in his "Phoebus and Pan" cantata to the bleating of the sheep in Strauss's "Don Quixote," the rattle and roar of the engine in Honegger's "Pacific 666," and various other modern instances. 'But of such things as these it must be said again that they go a very little way toward establishing the proposition that music itself is really capable of humor.' GERMANY AND SWEDEN Vossische Zeitung publishes two articles on the literary and artistic relations of Germany and Sweden that indicate a survival of their tradition of friendship. Dr. Wilhelm Grotkopp writes from Stockholm on the subject of German books in Sweden, and reports that, although there has been a general falling off in their sale during the last year, that is due to causes not affecting the relations of the two countries, and has been accompanied by a lively interest in certain special German writers. The increasingly important rôle played by newspapers in Swedish cultural life won to a large extent by their literary and intellectual vigor - is one of the reasons for the decline in the purchasing of foreign books; another is the disinclination of the Swedish reader for the kind of 'problematic' fiction typical of so much German writing. Even the lighter sort of German book is inaccessible to many readers, says Dr. Grotkopp, because of the type in which it is printed, and very frequently because of its price. Yet in spite of all this, such a book as Heinrich Mann's Der Kopf has been widely read, and authors like Hauptmann and Schnitzler are as well known in Sweden as anywhere outside of Germany itself. The work of Emil Ludwig - who has been called 'the Lytton Strachey of Germany' - has plenty of admirers there, as have also the writings of German globe-trotters like Colin Ross. In general, Swedish readers are more interested in informative works from the Continent than in creative writing. In 1924 an exhibition of German art was sent to Stockholm and was received there with great hospitality and friendly interest. During February of this year a reciprocal gesture was made by Swedish artists who sent a collection of their work to Germany, where it was exhibited in Hamburg, Lübeck, and Berlin. The opening of the exhibition in Hamburg was made a kind of international occasion, graced by the presence of the Swedish Ambassador, the Consul-General in Hamburg, a representative of the fine arts ministry from Berlin, and others. It included the work of such well-established artists of the older generation as Richard Bergh, Ander Zorn, Oscar Bjórek, and Bruno Liljefors, as well as of many younger postimpressionists. The Vossische Zeitung's reporter notes the prevalence among these latter of a command over severe and realistic form, and the reassertion of Northern ideals of clarity over certain alien influences. Pierre Jeanneret reports in the Semaine Littéraire a conversation with Signor Ferrero in which he confesses that, like Mr. St. Loe Strachey, he has turned to fiction late in life, and, also like his English confrère, intends to make his novel the reconstruction of an important historical epoch. In this case it is the Rome of thirty years ago instead of the Paris of the late forties; but the canvas will be even broader than Mr. Strachey's. Though he is determined not to make general ideas his point of departure, 'I particularly want this long work,' says the author, 'to be a chronicle of the emotional and intellectual state of Rome at the end of the nineteenth century.' If Signor Ferrero succeeds in his task, and he is not habituated to failure, his novel will be a broad, objective, epic piece of fiction in the old 'discredited' manner of Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert, not a subjectivist modern romance. 'In my opinion an author ought to let his characters reveal themselves by telling the reader what they do and say, instead of standing between the characters and the reader with his own explanations. Of course this method could be pushed too far and verge on out-and-out drama. In my book I shall describe the personalities of the characters who are already middle-aged at the beginning, so that their initial actions may be clear; but all the young characters I shall leave to their own devices, and let them take form and outline under the pressure of events.' Anything more specific than this the learned novelist refuses to divulge, but when a lady who was present at the interview asked whether it would be a novel with a 'key' - a novel using actual men and women as characters under more or less transparent disguises-'the master answered only with a sly and perhaps ironic smile.' |