And like another Helen fir'd another Troy. The difficulty of recalling such lines proves how unnecessary to melody is the entire absence of s's, sh's, and z's; but no one will deny that, except for special purposes, they are to be used attentively. A young English poet named Victor Ballan has published in Poetry of To-day a poem of forty-two lines in which he avoids the dangerous sound with unique completeness. The poem is entitled 'Reverie': If I dare to dream a dream, But the quiet noon, There I dream my dream. When I look for purer thought Than I'm inly prone to find, There I go, where oft I've caught Heavenly calm of mind. Rapt, upon the river bank Bordered by the verdure rank, Lifted nigh to God, I thank Love for purer thought. Fragrant air and lowing kine, Rippled ring and mirrored vault, In a unity combine Clear from earthly fault. Lone, I liberate my heart Unafraid, with God apart, Free to contemplate that Art Wrought in multichrome divine – Living, lived condign. Temporal care awhile forgot, Fortified, I quit my dream, Righter for the wrong I flee, I, with heart empowered anew, One cannot but admire the ingenuity of the experiment, and this poem is probably about as good as such a poem could be though we should like to see what Swinburne might have done with the task. It illustrates, nevertheless, an old dictum - that a tour de force can never be a first-rate poem. And what injury have sibilants done to such lines as these? Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits And surely more than all things sleep were sweet. 'MADAME BUTTERFLY' IN JAPAN CARRYING Coals to Newcastle is an undertaking hardly more superfluous, it would seem at first blush, than taking Hamlet to England, as the Italian actor Ruggero Ruggeri has recently done, or Madame Butterfly to Japan an act of daring performed not long ago by an Italian opera company. Yet London audiences, largely but not entirely made up of Italians, welcomed the former with interest and cordiality, and a Tokyo correspondent of the Morning Post says that, in spite of certain obvious obstacles to perfect hospitality, Puccini's opera was received by the Japanese with great applause. Some members of the audience at the Imperial Theatre, it is true, could not bring themselves to take Madame Butterfly as anything but a travesty on Japanese life and customs, but it is possible to appreciate their attitude if one tries to imagine seeing in New York a Japanese opera company-or its equivalent! having its way with The Girl of the Golden West, or, worse, with an opera on such a subject by a Japanese maestro. The costume worn by Cho-Cho-San's uncle, "The Bonze,' we are told, resembled that of Cardinal Wolsey rather than the clothes of a AN UNCONVENTIONAL REACTION It is the special danger of a reputation like Sir James Barrie's that it offers a rich ground for sentimentalism and mawkishness, and if now and then some hard-headed realist loses his patience over the payment of indiscriminate homage to such a writer, that is no more than one might expect. A 'colyumnist' in the Saturday Review who signs himself "Tallyman' finds himself moved to just this sort of protest over Sir James's recent speech at a dinner given to the Australian cricketers on their arrival in England. 'If there is only one thing in which I should like to see a reversion to war conditions,' he says, 'there very emphatically is one the rationing of Maconochie. Sir James Barrie is a highly successful writer, whom many people admire the other side of idolatry, and some, of whom I am one, about a furlong this side of it. Let him write and flourish. But let him not be tempted by the familiar spirit he invented and named Maconochie to further indulgence in the playful vein of oratory. The preposterous sycophancy of most of the daily papers should not delude him they are subedited by Scotsmen; but the readers are chiefly English, and their gorge rises at the kind of thing Sir James Barrie is lured into uttering. I cannot speak for the Australian cricketers; physically manly people sometimes have a taste for the intellectually sickly. But some of us others cannot endure the feeble fantasies, sugared sentiment, industrious jesting, of Sir James Barrie's speeches in connection with cricket or any other subject. They are in thoroughly bad taste, and ought to be discontinued.' THE TWELVE BEST ACTRESSES AND ACTORS MR. HERBERT FARJEON, the dramatic critic of the Westminster Gazette, is a bold man. He recently drew up a list of the twelve actresses whom he considers England's best, and even apologized for having merely underlined the obvious. How many names in his list are familiar to American playgoers? It included: Sara Allgood, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Fay Compton, Gwen Ffrangcon Davies, Edith Evans, Ada King, Maire O'Neill, Athene Seyler, Marie Tempest, Sybil Thorndike, Madge Titheradge, and Irene Vanbrugh. His corresponding list of actors, which omits Sir Gerald du Maurier, Sir John Martin-Harvey, and Henry Ainley, has even fewer international names: Frank Cellier, Franklyn Dyall, Robert Farquharson, Seymour Hicks, Baliol Holloway, Herbert Lomas, Norman McKinnel, Miles Malleson, Hay Petrie, Leon Quartermaine, Claude Rains, and Arthur Sinclair. Mr. George Arliss, Mr. Cyril Maude, and Mr. Norman Trevor to name no others are probably omitted as irrevocably expatriate! FOR A WELSH NATIONAL THEATRE IRELAND and Scotland, as Mr. Shirland Quin points out in the Daily Telegraph, have been interpreted artistically to English audiences not only through their own plays but through their own actors. The Welsh drama for it exists - is not unknown to London theatregoers, but it is purveyed to them through the medium of English actors, and on those terms, protests Mr. Quin, it can never be fairly appreciated. 'Imagine Juno and the Paycock presented by an all-English cast. The thing is unthinkable. Yet that kind of production is all that the Welsh dramatist has been able to get in London hitherto.' In 1925 two Welsh dramas were seen in the West End, Mr. Richard Hughes's The Comedy of Good and Evil and Mr. Caradoc Evans's Taffy, and the critical reaction to both was extremely favorable. Mr. Quin believes that the drama has a future in Wales if, even as things are, such men as these two writers can be produced, but he foresees a danger that Welsh playwrights will turn from local and national subjects to 'themes which can and should be interpreted by English artists.' Companies of native actors do exist in Wales, and last summer two of these gave performances at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. What Mr. Quin urges is that such companies, which are on a more or less amateur basis, should be combined for serious professional work, and a fund established for a Welsh National Theatre. KEMAL'S STATUE "THE first statue to be erected in Turkey' will perhaps never be erected after all. after all. The Austrian sculptor's bronze representation of Mustapha Kemal, which was to have been set up on Seraglio Point in Constantinople, has aroused a storm of protest in the former Turkish capital, on the ground that it is a highly unsuccessful portrait of the Turkish hero and that its erection would be an injury to the selfrespect of the nation. Certainly the Guardian a somewhat expression- picture of that statue in the Manchester libraries in Europe. To bibliophiles, says the Morning Post, the fine bindings, many of them designed by the owner, are the most interesting feature of the collection. Several of these beautifully bound books have been owned by royal personages; Henry VIII's copy of Erasmus's work on the pronunciation of Greek, Louis XIV's copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and books owned by James I, George III, Napoleon, and Nicholas I of Russia, are in the collection. Racine's copy of Hesiod and a presentation of a copy work by Casaubon are among the association volumes. Of very * A MANET FOR ENGLAND THE treasures of English art may be vanishing to America in alarming proportions, but perhaps English artlovers may find compensation in the number and quality of Continental pictures and statues they have recently acquired. Most of these have come and will continue to come through the use of a fund of fifty thousand pounds given to the Tate Gallery by the wellknown collector, Mr. Samuel Courtauld, for this express purpose. The latest acquisition is an extremely fine Manet, the famous Bar des Folies Bergère, the exhibition of which at the Salon of 1882 was the occasion for Manet's admission to the Légion d'Honneur. The writer Huysmans said of it at the time that it is certainly the most modern and most interesting picture at the present Salon.' early editions there are the first Greek book to be printed, Laskaris's Greek Grammar, printed at Milan in 1476, the Milanese Greek and Latin Psalter of 1481, and the editio princeps of Suidas's Lexicon of 1499. There are also the first Greek books printed in Paris, Vienna, Spain, and Athens. A GREAT LIBRARY THE American School of Classical Studies in Athens recently received as a gift in trust from Mr. John Gennadios, for many years Greek Minister in London, one of the finest private COUNT HERMANN KEYSERLING THE BOOK OF THE MONTH Science and the Modern World, by A. N. Whitehead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.50. [Outlook] PROFESSOR WHITEHEAD'S book on the Concept of Nature is rightly recognized as one of the outstanding achievements, perhaps indeed the outstanding achievement, of English post-war philosophical thought. It has not, it is true, the clarity of phrase and brilliance of style that marked Professor Eddington's almost contemporary work on Space, Time and Gravitation; it was frankly rather difficult going here and there. But those who persevered along a path that was at times somewhat rough and rugged were more than rewarded by the vision from the rarefied height to which Professor Whitehead conducted his readers. If he made no concessions to mere popularity of treatment, he achieved in compensation a depth of thought that possessed an austere beauty of its own that severity of intellectual beauty which can be achieved only when the mind is steeped in mathematics. It was therefore with every anticipation of pleasure that one turned to Professor Whitehead's new book on Science and the Modern World. Those who had already toiled up the steep and difficult path of natural philosophy with him before were assured in advance that the reward would be worth the travail; half at least of the road would probably be a familiar memory, and there was at least the possibility that in the intervening years Professor Whitehead might himself have reached a still more commanding height of vision. So far at least as the first part of the book is concerned, these expectations are not disappointed. The earlier chapters or lectures contain a minute and penetrating analysis of the developments of European thought through the centuries. Professor Whitehead makes it clear that had he chosen he could have been as good an historian as philosopher; it is not usual to find an authority on mechanics and geometry able to quote Gregory the Great and other authorities of the Dark Ages in proof or disproof of modern instances. Moreover, the Professor has a real, if unexpected, sense of humor, occasionally of a slightly sardonic kind. This is of genuine assistance to his argument in his very short and somewhat too elementary exposition of the quantum theory; but wit is a perilous gift of the gods, and it perhaps leads him a little too near to paradox at other times to be an entirely safe ally in the classroom. It is, for example, extremely diverting to be told that the mediæval and Renaissance Church objected to scientific discovery on purely rationalist grounds; and no doubt there is a great deal of truth in the picture of the man of science as a gay adventurer and romantic pioneer pushing forward into the unknown, while the priest, with a logically closed system of belief in one hand, and a fagot in the other, looked on distrustfully at these excursions. But this can hardly be accepted as a full statement of the conflict between European religion and science through the ages, and this easy method of treatment would perhaps have been more suited to an essay by Mr. Chesterton in one of the reviews than to a series of lectures before a great American university. On the other hand, Professor Whitehead shows an amazing knowledge of English poetry, which he quotes with an extraordinary insight into the poetic mind. He is always ready with exactly the right passage to prove his case, and this, it must be admitted, is not an easy task when one remembers the voluminous Wordsworth, the mass as well as the majesty of Milton, and the bulk as well as the beauty of Shelley. Poets are almost always more prolific than philosophers or men of science; the best of their work becomes proverbial, but the ruck of verse is familiar only to the |