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the Japanese official searched in vain for him. The frosted windows of the train did not allow him to look inside. At length he rushed into the first-class car and began to search through the compartments. When he came to the one that the official occupied he discovered a sheet of paper fixed to the door, bearing the words, 'Entrance forbidden.' In spite of that he started to enter; but the gold miner barred the way with his huge body and silently pointed to the paper.

Twenty minutes later the train again started. The Russian took the paper from the door, thrust it in his pocket, and entered the compartment as if nothing had happened. The Japanese was furious and berated the Siberian gentleman, calling him names in both Japanese and Russian. The latter feigned unbounded astonishment and absolute ignorance of what had happened. When the poor official explained how 'the beastly cur' had treated him, the owner apologized profusely. The

Russian scolded his dog and offered the Japanese some refreshments from a small lunch bag he carried with him. But the latter refused his hospitality. No doubt the Japanese had already made a shrewd guess that the gold miner was only a new link in the chain over which his other agents in Siberia had tripped. When half an hour later the train stopped at a little way station, and the Russian rose and bade him adieu with more profuse apologies, the Japanese stared at him so furiously that he could not help smiling as he hurried to the door.

So far as I know this was the last attempt of our allies to spy upon our military operations in Siberia. The Foreign Office official's abortive trip, which I have just described, occurred in January 1917. Less than two months later the Revolution broke out, and, being a marked man on account of my work in the Tsar's secret service, I was promptly placed under arrest by the new Government.

RUSSIA AND GERMANY 1

BY ANDRÉ PIERRE

BREST-LITOVSK has been a heavy burden for the Bolsheviki to carry. Certainly, when they signed a separate peace with Imperial Germany, they did great injury to the Allies and compromised hope of an ultimate victory, which was by no means assured in March 1918. Nevertheless, the more we study the memoirs written by different generals, and the diplomatic

1 From the Gazette de Prague (Prague Frenchlanguage information weekly), May 5

archives made public since the Revolution, the readier we are to extenuate in some degree the action of the Bolsheviki and to hold the Imperial Government itself in part responsible for the action of Lenin and his friends.

It is no longer possible to-day to doubt that the Russian aristocracy contemplated the possibility of a separate peace with Germany long before the 1917 revolution. Thinly veiled allusions to such a plan appear in

the four volumes of correspondence between Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna. Secret correspondence between the Tsaritza and her brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, certain negotiations begun by Madame Vasilchikov in Germany, the odd proposal made by Count Eulenburg, Minister of the Court of William II, to his Russian colleague, Baron Frederichs, for 'a personal getting-together of the two Emperors,' all forbid our doubting longer that as the war wore on sentiment in favor of peace between the two countries gained ground rapidly among the ruling classes of Russia and at the Imperial Court.

But here is something more precise. A Russian review, Golos Minuvshago, or 'The Voice of the Past,' published in Paris by the historian Melgunov, has just printed for the first time a memoir drawn up in 1918 by the former Minister of the Interior, Protopopov, shortly before he was shot by the Bolsheviki. A preface precedes the document, written by Piotr Ryss, who relates a conversation that he had with Protopopov during the last weeks of his life. It contains this significant passage relative to the secret interviews at Stockholm with the German diplomat, Warburg, at the time when a delegation of the Duma made its trip abroad:

'Every reasonable man in Russia, including nearly all of the leaders of the Ka-Det Party, was convinced that Russia was in no condition to continue the war. Physically exhausted, without a domestic iron and steel industry to speak of, and with her uneducated masses inclined to anarchy, the country felt itself on the verge of revolution. But such a revolution could not fail to assume the form of a savage revolt, of anarchy disastrous for the nation. Consequently it seemed imperative to ascertain under what conditions the

Germans were willing to conclude a peace with all the Allies. Neither Protopopov nor any of those who agreed with him contemplated a separate peace (between Russia and Germany). That is why Protopopov did not think it expedient to decline a rendezvous with Warburg. Furthermore, (a) all the members of the Duma delegation were delegation were informed of this conversation; (b) the question of a separate peace was not raised; and (c) the meeting was, to a certain extent, official.

"The two latter statements are proved by the fact that the conversations between Protopopov and Warburg occurred in the presence of the Russian Ambassador, Nekliudov; in other words, what everybody else was talking about, Protopopov did. "That was the whole sum and substance of my wrongdoing," said the ex-minister in concluding his account.'

If we take this passage at its face value, it simply means that a responsible minister of the Tsar took steps at Stockholm very similar to those that were taken by the Western Allies in Switzerland and elsewhere, but that the only thing contemplated was a possible general peace between the Entente and the Central Powers. But right here, at point (b), which specifically mentions a separate peace, Mr. Ryss adds a footnote containing the following supplementary explanation, which leaves no question as to the ultimate intentions of the Russian autocracy, after it felt itself threatened by a revolution:

'It had been the opinion of Protopopov since early in the war that Russia ought to inform the Allies several months in advance that, being unable to continue the war longer, the Government proposed to end it at a

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the Allies refused. We may even go to the extent of saying that the only reason he did not carry out the plan was because the revolution did not leave him time to do so.

The Bolsheviki themselves 'committed the treachery' that the Provisional Government under Kerenskii refused to commit. And it is to be observed that they adopted the same tactics that Protopopov contemplated

first, to try to get the Allies to make a general peace; second, if the Allies refused, to break the pact of 1914 and to treat separately with Berlin. So let me repeat once more that, although we have no desire whatever to whitewash the Bolsheviki, we cannot shut our eyes to the light of such a document as the one from which I have just quoted. The Soviet Government did not stand alone in its policy of betrayal.

DEATH'S HERITAGE

BY HUMBERT WOLFE

[Spectator]

ALL men are heirs to riches. They inherit
A vast estate the day that they draw breath.
They by the right of Eve, and Adam's merit,
Assume the feudal policies of death.

Their actions wear his livery. Their thought

Is the tradition of his seigneurie.

Their dreams are heirlooms, and their love is naught
But whispers and his fleeting memory.

But some refuse their heritage. These owe

Dangerous fealty to life the lord

That lights them home by ways death does not know

To Eden by the flashes of his sword

The poets from the riches of the dead
Magnificently disinherited.

PLAYGOING IN CHINA AND JAPAN 1

BY PAUL SCHEFFER

My first visit to a Chinese theatre was made in Shanghai during the hottest days of August. Handkerchiefs waved here and there throughout the audience, as the spectators stolidly cooled their perspiring faces. The lighting maintained an unpleasant sort of half-darkness, depending as it did on electric lamps that were thickly covered with dust. The light on the stage, however, was extremely bright. Throughout the audience there was constant movement, and as a great many children were present there was a certain amount of crying and screaming. But no one seemed to pay the slightest attention to it.

As a matter of fact, it was scarcely noticeable at all, for the Chinese drama is fundamentally musical, but 'atonal.' The notes seem to range over five scales all at once. The orchestra · which, along with a good many other things, takes its place on the stage is — very rarely silent. It consists of six or eight men, and if there were more it would be unendurable. In Hangchow, where I heard an orchestra of fresh young players, I finally had to flee from the house.

Chinese orchestral music seems to me to have three fundamental tonal elements. One is dizzyingly shrill; one is thunderous to the point of delirium; one is simply scraping. Its whole thematic system seems to consist of overstimulation, deafening noise, and an approach to the limits between sensu

1 From the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Liberal daily), April 25

ousness and pain. The high points that our music now and then reaches for a moment at a time as climaxes where one could no more rest than on the point of a bayonet - are on the ordinary level of Chinese music. When the oboes or the violins are used as solo instruments, they provide a kind of relaxation simply through contrastbut only in that way. After a dozen notes are produced you begin to feel that this music too is a cyclone, albeit a simplified one. The Chinese enjoy immensely these modulations of the extremes. To us they are but half comprehensible. Only Europeans who have become thoroughly Orientalized can understand what this music means to the Chinese, and these Europeans are as silent about such things as the Chinese themselves.

Every now and then a little 'super' stumbles over one of the musicians. Even the apprentice actors loiter about the stage probably in order to learn how to behave there. The hands who bring on and remove the necessary properties, and carry the pillows that are used to protect the costumes, are there ex officio. A couple of spectators walk up on the stage, probably to speak to someone they know. Indeed, the stage seems to be a kind of meetingplace, even in the eyes of the actors.

Six hundred years ago a Chinese actress became an imperial concubine and later the mother of an emperor. Since then, it is said, only men have been allowed to adopt the profession of acting. Young actors are trained from

early youth to play the rôles of women, and until the end of their lives are able to sing falsetto. Not even the warlike stage-emperor allows himself to descend to a mezzo-soprano. The Chinese actor learns how to step mincingly, to assume a languorous expression, to ogle, to sway, to curtseyin short, to carry out in overt gesture everything that one sees so incredulously on a Chinese teacup. He learns the great art, especially admired in the South, of reaching his soft white hands out of the long full sleeves of his costume, fanning gently with them, and now and then lifting the index finger charmingly in the air. Seldom is he allowed to laugh while he is playing a feminine rôle; indeed, I have never seen this happen on the stage. When he draws his hand back into his sleeve, he must know how to weep softly, turning away from the audience to a half-profile position.

For this reason, however, the Chinese theatre is really a majestic flight from reality, a triumph of artificiality things that we are only now seeking for in our artistic life. Compared with the Chinese drama, the 'grand manner' of Racine, the style of the fête galantes, are as realistic as a play like Hauptmann's Weavers. The plot of a Chinese play is regarded as a mere trifle, and indeed can be said to be hardly more than a scenario, indicated by a few lines of dialogue. It does n't even make much difference what words are sung. The important thing throughout is how. When the hero rescues the daughter who has had her ears boxed at a distance of a couple of yards! - and has then been sent out to gather wood, and when, to do so, he has to dismount from his horse, it is this action itself that is the important thing. Up to the crucial point you have the crudest naturalism. At that moment, however, the actor's speed begins to slackenthe 'ornamental moment' has come!

The actor strikes a wonderfully balanced pose that lasts longer than the real action itself - and therein lies the difficulty! Undoubtedly this is a reminiscence of Chinese painting. It is an integration of the individual, the stylized, the symbolistic, the real, with incredible sureness and consummateness of form.

But wait just a moment! A warrior is making his entrance. He is War itself. Two gigantic pheasant feathers hang to right and left from his gayly colored helmet; eight silken streamers fly from his back; he carries a broadsword, and has nothing about him that is not costly and sumptuous. As a matter of fact he is a kind of impersonation of an approaching army. He glances about him as fiercely as an eagle. A field marshal! Now he strides forward, frowning, arrogant, swaggering the very incarnation of war and its horrors. And now as he bows to the mild-mannered Emperor, and addresses him in the required falsetto, he gives the impression chiefly of a hero. Which one of these things does the actor really represent? Well, all of them together, to tell the truth in the same way as women are commonly supposed to combine art with nature, concealment with revelation, and appearance with reality.

The hero who has put us through all this according to the most ancient usages, and has earned the approving 'Hau, hau!' of the audience, turns aside complacently to have a cup of tea, which he drinks with an elegant gesture. There is still a touch of his theatrical function in his manner; the gesture does not belong to the play, but it decidedly belongs to the theatre. Here, again, it is not so important what he does as how he does it.

If it were not too difficult a task, I should like to describe Mei Lan Fang, the greatest contemporary Chinese

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