shown that there are as many curiosities attached to this sense as to any other. As I have said, it is the only sense that becomes more acute with age. Infants, as soon as they are born, perceive odors, but apparently not strongly; as the child grows up, the sense slowly develops until about the age of fourteen, when a curious difference between the olfaction of the male and the female makes its appearance. After this age, not only has the female a more acute sense of smell than has the male, but each prefers a different kind of odorous substance. Men like such odors as pine oil, musk, and cedar oil, while women as a rule dislike them. Women, on the other hand, show a preference for scents that men dislike, especially for camphor, menthol, and citronella. Why these differences should exist is not known, but they are very sharply marked. It has been suggested that they may be based on those factors that are said to determine the more acute sense of smell in females excessive smoking among men, this tending to dull the sense, and the greater need for olfaction in women, since they engage in cooking and the domestic arts. If this be the reason, the differences will soon disappear with the advance of modern tendencies. As we grow older the sense of smell becomes, not only more acute, but more discriminating. Such tastes as the liking for high game and overripe cheese are not natural; they are acquired only as age advances, and are quite foreign to young people. The development as we grow older is also connected with another fact: as we have increasing experience we tend to take more notice of our sensations. From this point of view the sense of smell is eminently adapted to education, for if we pay attention to our perceptions of odors, as a winetaster or a gourmet does, we can easily cultivate the sense and increase its discriminating powers. This occurs to an extraordinary extent in a few people who have so keen a sense of smell that they can distinguish people by their odor, and even streets by their own peculiar aroma. Whitechapel, I dare say, smells differently from Mayfair, and no doubt many could recognize the difference; but how many do? Not very many, for most of us think that we can get on quite well without the sense of olfaction, so far as matters of ordinary life are concerned, and so become accustomed to allow our sensations to pass unnoticed. But because they are unnoticed, we are by no means uninfluenced by them. This is just what constitutes the peculiarity of the sense of smell. We get sensations, as with any other sense, but for some peculiar reason they do not always pass over the threshold into consciousness, and, if they do pass, they are frequently unrecognizably altered in the process. Take an example: You may go to a disused house, and as you enter you feel a curious and unexplainable repugnance to the place. The idea cannot be shaken off, and you elaborate it half unconsciously; you say you feel that there is something sinister about the place, and you may even end by believing that it is haunted. All that has really happened, in nine cases out of ten, is that your sense of smell, more alert than you give it credit to be, has informed you that the place smells unventilated and musty. But this sensation does not pass into consciousness as it stands - unless it is a very strong one and the house actually reeks of something; it becomes changed, transposed into something other than a mere perception of smell, and gives rise to a vague fear and feeling of discomfort. Sensations of smell are almost unique in this respect; relegated to unused attics of our minds, they appear in unrecognized forms through other channels. Many of the unexplained antipathies that certain people possess as, for instance, the very general dislike of cats and the ability of knowing, by a kind of vague feeling, when one of the detested creatures is in a room can be explained in a somewhat similar way. It is quite likely that under these circumstances one is warned of the cat's presence by an unnoticed sensation of smell. Not only is the olfactory sense itself a very subsidiary one for the purposes of everyday life, but the memory of odors is in most people exceedingly defective. Out of every hundred people, only about ten or fifteen can recollect in a realistic way a particular odor; if you ask the average person to call up in his mind the smell of roses, he will probably fail completely. Sometimes by concentrating his mind on a scene which, in his past experience, was associated with roses, he may succeed, but even then the realism of the memory in no way compares with the actual sensation of the fragrance of the flowers. This is, of course, the inevitable result of our paying so little attention to our olfactory sensations. But suppose that we now reverse the process, and give the person roses to smell, perferably when his mind is unoccupied by any particular train of thought; at once, in nine cases out of ten, some past scene rises into his mind, emotions are let loose, and he recalls things long past that he could not have remembered by the greatest effort. Odors are an unfailing key to the subconscious, and arouse more emotions than do any other sensation. The sense of smell is thus one of those little islands untouched by the advance of science, unclaimed for its proper use; we do not know how the olfactory organ functions, we know little about olfactory memory, we do not know enough about the potentialities of the sense to employ it usefully. There are many such little islands, but there are few on which the amateur investigator, armed with nothing but his interest and a power of observation, can advance so safely and with such prospects of finding what others have missed in their search. THE NEWSPAPER SOLILOQUIZES BY THOMAS HARDY [Observer] YES; yes; I am old. In me appears Empires', kings', captives' births and deaths; Strange faiths, and fleeting shibboleths: Tragedy, comedy, throngs my page Beyond all mummed on any stage: Cold hearts beat hot, hot hearts beat cold, And I beat on. Yes; yes; I am old. LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS REINHARDT AND ČAPEK ON ENGLAND DRAMATIC critics have not been wanting in Germany to protest against the number of English plays imported to their stage perhaps a typical example of Reviewers' Grouch, since there is no reason to suppose that these plays have not answered a genuine demand on the part of theatregoers. Max Reinhardt, the producer chiefly culpable, said as much not long ago to a correspondent of the Observer. "The modern British playwright is giving the world what it wants to-day. I am astounded at the immense amount of dramatic talent now being manifested in England, and I have bought a number of new plays for production in Berlin.' This remark was made during a rehearsal of Somerset Maugham's Victoria, and the correspondent notes that Frederick Lonsdale's comedy, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, was simultaneously in preparation by Barnowsky, another famous Berlin manager. Herr Reinhardt pursued his observations by suggesting that this taste for English drama is due to the atmosphere of lightness and humor with which it handles modern conditions. "This the public wants, and this we cannot get just now from any other country. But I personally cannot see that we are doing any more for the reputation of the British playwright than we have always done. What about Shaw's reputation having been made here, and the fact that Wilde has never been forgotten? It seems to me to lie in the fact of Germany's geographical position that foreign plays will always be welcomed here whatever the Germans are writing. Did we not play Ibsen when nobody else did? And Tolstoi? And Italian plays of all descriptions? The German theatre has welcomed every sort of French play. To-day these have not the success of the English drama here. It is only because England is giving us what nobody else can give just now that we are putting on English plays in preference to others.' Further to the east English literature is coming into its own in a no less telling way. A firm of publishers in Prague is designing a series of translations from English and American classic writers to be known as the 'Standard Library.' Karel Čapek, the best known of contemporary Czech writers, — by virtue chiefly of R. U. R., - has written to the editor of this library expressing great enthusiasm for the project, and making some interesting generalizations about the English temperament in literature. He observes that a sojourn in England impressed upon him that the most remarkable thing about the country is that it is all so like English literature. 'I am still uncertain,' he says, - with perhaps an ironical allusion to Taine's famous theories about the effect of climate on literature, - 'whether it is the English climate that has such an influence on English literature, or whether, on the contrary, English literature is the cause of the English climate and other customs.' It is a diverting notion that English tragedy may be the cause of London fogs, and the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens responsible for the English spring. But Mr. Čapek must not be pressed too far on the grounds of what is perhaps not a scientific speculation, especially since he proceeds to another observation of a less questionable sort. Sitting in the editor's English garden on one occasion, he says, 'I realized one great feature of English literature-its absolute Englishness. Indeed, no other literature, except the Russian, is as national as English literature. . . . It is true that we have something to learn from England; it is not, however, their Protestantism, or their golf, or their English cooking, or the English Sunday, but the English passion to live in an English manner and to seek salvation in an English way. That is an example that English literature provides, and that I regard as particularly sound for our national health.' In this same connection, it is interesting to hear of a one-act play on Shakespeare produced in Budapest at the opening of the annual Shakespeare cycle of the National Theatre. Readers of the Living Age will remember that Dr. Hevesi, the director, is a wellknown Shakespearean scholar and translator, and that he produces the plays of the great Englishman not only because of their literary importance but because they infallibly draw well. The present play, entitled The Swan Song, treats of Shakespeare's last hours in Stratford, stifled by the atmosphere of Puritanism that has begun to creep over England. Lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream that he hears recited by a young player in a traveling troupe recall to him his triumphant earlier days, and in a state of some excitement he draws forth a Hamlet costume from a property trunk, and dies in it after dictating the last lines of The Tempest. AMERICA AND ART IT did not need the news of Mr. Munsey's princely bequest to alarm many art-lovers in Europe at the spectacle of America's gradually accumulating the treasures of the Old World. That news, however, probably acted as the immediate incentive to the introduction into the House of Commons of a bill by Sir Henry Slesser to prohibit the export from the United Kingdom of certain works of art. This bill will apply to buildings as well as to paintings and sculpture. One might suppose that all right-thinking Britishers would agree to this method of combating the menace in question, yet two such distinguished authorities as as Sir Joseph Duveen and Sir Flinders Petrie express exactly the opposite opinion in the columns of the Morning Post. Sir Joseph points out that to permit the sale of landed estates and to prohibit the sale of works of art housed on those estates is as illogical as anything could well be; both possessions are likely to be inheritances from a man's ancestors, and, as the value of the pictures is likely to be the greater of the two, the dictates of genuine patriotism and family feeling would advise their sale. Further, the inflow of American capital that results from this exchange is of inestimable value to British industry, and is not accompanied by any real impoverishment of British galleries. 'Nothing,' concludes Sir Joseph, 'can be more helpful in cementing the friendship of the two nations than this exchange of Romneys, Reynolds, and Gainsboroughs for hard cash.' This last point is the one Sir Flinders Petrie chiefly dwells on in speaking of the 'carting' of English manor houses and the like to America; so long as old and unusable buildings are taxed as they now are, he says, their owners will be justified in disposing of them and without any more evil results, after all, than the acquisition by AngloSaxon Americans of a certain number of fine old examples of British architecture. Sir Charles Holmes, the director of the National Gallery, calls attention in the same paper to the recent purchase in New York of a portrait by John Linnell at the Leverhulme Sale as an indication that American art-collectors are capable of more daring than they have often been credited with. Linnell was a painter of real distinction, and this picture is an excellent one, but in England he has not yet been fully appreciated, and his pictures are a drug on the market. MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE ON EACH OTHER We know what Ben Jonson thought of Shakespeare, whom he 'loved, this side idolatry, as much as any man,' but we have no way of knowing directly what Shakespeare thought of Ben. That judgment would be an entertaining one; and we should be no less happy to have Shakespeare's frank opinion of his older contemporary, Kit Marlowe. The Saturday Review has latterly inaugurated a series of literary competitions set by its editors and regular contributors, of whom Mr. Ivor Brown, the dramatic critic, has been not the least ingenious. He challenged competitors to phrase in a hundred words each or less Shakespeare's opinion of Marlowe, and Marlowe's opinion of Shakespeare. "These opinions are supposed to be expressed in conversation in the absence of the man discussed, and the date imagined is just before Marlowe's death in 1593.' The winning and the second-prize entries are printed in a recent Saturday. We lean to the latter on the grounds both of language and of dramatic subtlety. It runs as follows: Marlowe speaks: Young Shakespeare? A forward fellow, but useful, Burbage tells me, in patching of old matter. He'll never go far, but far enough, no doubt, to ape his betters. Has a quick ear for a phrase and a shrewd wit to make it his own, but little skilled in fancy. What I most mislike in the dog is his meanfistedness, every groat saved, shares bought in theatres what manner of poet is this that will turn usurer? A fellow devoid of learning, too. O one of the ruck, I tell you, one of the ruck. . . Shakespeare speaks: — Master Marlowe counts a bare few months older than I, yet already is the world enriched by him. How fortunate is our age from which so bright a star is risen! How fierce a passion, how tender a sweetness, how dark a tragedy, hath he already mirrored for his generation! Truly, I would the man kept better company, yet must he ever move as a whale among minnows. And which of us may ever hope to rival him in poesy? The name of Marlowe, I tell you, will be writ large in England when all we lie forgot. THE FRENCH STAGE AGAIN IF M. Henry Bidou, the literary director of the new Theatre of Young Authors in Paris, may be taken as an authority, the vogue of the light comedy which M. William Speth bewailed in an article recently quoted here is doomed, and the French stage is on the verge of an era in which tragedy will resume a rôle of great importance. The Theatre of Young Authors was founded last year by a group of fifty-two playwrights, some well known, some obscure, for the sake of making possible the production of plays by young writers whom commer |