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LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS

PARIS NIGHTS

THE Anglo-Americanization of Paris has enormously simplified the task of the foreign pleasure-seeker, who now assures himself of an entertaining evening by visiting, in company with the native population of the city, the more pretentious musical revues. At the present moment the most profitable evening in Paris is to be found at the Théâtre Marigny when Sacha Guitry and Albert Willemetz's satirical revue, 'Vive la Republique,' is on the boards. The first act is given over to skillful lampooning of contemporary politics the fall of the franc, the debt to America, the rapid succession of Finance Ministers. The second part, like our old Cohan revues, burlesques the current theatrical hits, and, though not so clever as the first part, is more comprehensible to the stranger. Geneviève Vix, late of the Opéra, adds greatly to the evening's gayety.

Those who prefer to linger over their cigars and light wines will find it well worth while to visit the show at the Palace, arriving about ten-fifteen, in time to see the inimitable Grock. It is safe to say that if this gifted clown had been playing as long and successfully in New York as he has abroad he would even now be recognized by the daring Dial as the equal of Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, and the Four Marx Brothers. It is likely that this emancipated journal would also recommend a visit to the Casino de Paris, where Maurice Chevalier is singing French songs in the best traditions of American vaudeville.

The legitimate stage offers a much less tempting bill of fare. Sacha Guitry's Mozart, a featherweight play with music and Yvonne Printemps, will soon close for the summer, and the only other dramatic company worth visiting is the Russian Pitoëffs, who have been presenting works by those two eminent boulevardiers, Pirandello and Bernard Shaw. The Comédie Française is still doing business at the old stand, but the Odéon is temporarily trying its hand at the revue line too.

Perhaps the best way of describing the rest of the French stage is to give the titles of some half-dozen shows, in our crude English speech. We take, as horrible examples, "The Love Blues,' 'Not on the Mouth,' 'The Bigamist,' "Three Naked Girls,' 'Passionately,' "The Wedding Night.'

Perhaps the safest thing to do is to avoid the theatre altogether and go in only for concerts, of which there are many excellent ones; or even sink to American movies. The French films, except for a marvelous picture of the Citroën motor-tractor expedition across Africa, are worthless. Cabarets and restaurants of the better order are what we have in New York, and sometimes excel the original; and the Russian joints are decidedly superior to the Manhattan equivalent. The safest rule for the American tourist is to follow other American tourists and discover that the discerning native and the wide-eyed Babbitt plunge into the same dives.

FREUD AT SEVENTY

No name in modern psychology, not even that of William James, has become so much a part of the general vocabulary as that of Sigmund Freud, the great Viennese psychiatrist, who has recently celebrated his seventieth birthday. German and Austrian birthdays, especially those of what Nietz sche used to call Wir Gelehrten, are not allowed to pass as quietly as birthdays pass elsewhere, and the Germanlanguage press has been full of tributes to the inventor of dire complexes, of treacherous 'slips,' and of highly imaginative dream-symbolisms. In the

Neue Freie Presse Dr. Paul Schilder tells the story of Freud's slow and patient work, against ordinary as well as exceptional obstacles, to extend his early lessons on hysteria-as taught by Charcot at Paris-to the whole science of pathological behavior.

'Society and his own professional colleagues from the beginning as little inclined as ever to lend an ear to new ideas felt no great gratitude to the daring investigator who tore the veil away from the perilous instincts and impulses of the human soul. His doctrine was regarded as a dangerous one, and the intellect, acting under the influence of all the forces of "repression" itself, did its best to brand the new knowledge as meaningless. But imperceptibly the Freudian theories began to find friendly students and advocates, who made contributions of their own to the master's ideas, and triumph was at hand. The develop ment of psychology, of neurology, and of psychiatry in the last two centuries has been a development toward Freud —and that means a development upward.'

'I have n't the slightest idea,' says Stefan Zweig, in a somewhat different vein in the Literarische Welt, 'whether

the two or three concepts, the dictionary abbreviations, and the teatable chatter that Freud's tremendous intellectual labors have made possible, are sound or not; I only know that Sigmund Freud has done more than all but a few, perhaps more than anyone, in our time to prepare the way for an unprecedented vigor in psychological study by his stimulating thinking, his fresh vision, and his sharp penetration into the unknown. He has sounded the depths of the soul and illuminated them; he has risked daring speculations, and he has suggested meanings for phenomena over which psychology had previously blundered without inspiration.'

LONDON THEATRES

SEAN O'CASEY, whose Juno and the Paycock is now being played in New York, is the man of the hour on the London stage. That play, the outstanding achievement of the year, has now given place to the Plough and the Stars, written by the same author and performed by the same company in the same theatre. O'Casey has no mercy for his countrymen, which may partly account for the success of his work in the British capital. The most overpraised play of the season is Conflict, by a chinless dramatist named Miles Malleson, who, one suspects, must have blackmailed half the critics in London to get the notices he did. To say that it is immeasurably worse than Galsworthy's Strife is not putting matters a bit too strongly, yet the press united in crowning Mr. Malleson as the equal of Pinero as a master of dramatic technique and the superior of John Maynard Keynes as an economist. The play, it may be said, deals with the difficulties between Capital and Labor. To see Mr. Malleson's not unamusing performance in Riverside Nights is

perhaps the best way of understanding why Conflict is so poor certainly this successful attempt at a British ChauveSouris is worth visiting on its own account. Nigel Playfair and A. P. Herbert of Punch are responsible for the most amusing scenes, and a young lady named Elsie Lanchester bids fair to rival Beatrice Lillie.

For the rest, the conquest of the British stage by American playwrights and musical-comedy mongers is nearly complete. Lady Be Good with the Astaires, and Kid Boots with the inadequate Leslie Henson in Eddie Cantor's shoes, are the best revues in town. Rose Marie is in its second year, and No, No, Nanette has turned up like a bad penny not only in London but in Paris and Berlin as well. One of the better native comedies is This Woman Business, written by one Ben Levy at the age of nineteen, and starring Fay Compton. It is far better fare than The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, which the New York stage already knows to its cost.

Incidentally, "The Big Parade' has just had its London première. After passing a few kind remarks about the technical excellence of this film, most. of the critics take off their shirts and plunge into a vigorous attack on a story about three American soldiers that does not waste any time on what the British and French troops were doing at the moment, however irrelevant such matters might be to the story in hand. Indeed, their onslaught on this 'America won the war' theme is so vigorous that one suspects the lady of protesting too much.

slang, beginning with the expression 'Quoz,' the centenary of which is being celebrated this year. We are told that this word was flung frequently, in the year 1826, at impertinent persons who asked you questions that you preferred not to answer. The next really formidable success was, 'What a shocking bad hat!' which soon blossomed into a game almost as popular as and even more strenuous than the renowned 'Beaver!' Wearers of worn and torn headpieces were in constant danger of having the offending object snatched from their heads and hurled into the gutter by enthusiastic athletes.

The year 1835 is agreed upon by most scholars as the time at which 'Does your mother know you're out?' first convulsed a weary world. Five more years of fasting and prayer were necessary before 'Do you see any green in my eye' made its bow. The closing decades of the nineteenth century were more prolific, and they may be held responsible for 'I would I were with Nancy,' 'Whoa, Emma, mind the paint,' 'Not to-day, baker,' 'Not in these trousers,' 'Where did you get that hat?' and 'Let 'em all come.' Some of these have been heard in the States and may even have originated here. Nowadays, with Ring Lardner, H. C. Witwer, Sinclair Lewis, Milt Gross, and Anita Loos hard at work recording the speech of the proletariat and our aristocracy of salesmen and movie stars, we are likely to surpass even the achievements of the British in this important field.

ENGLISH SLANGUAGE

WRITING in T. P.'s and Cassell's Weekly, Mr. Roy Cumberland embarks on a brief history of British

OUR WALKER GOLFERS

WHAT most impressed the English about the American Walker Cup golf team was the remarkably good form of the players-especially Bobby Jones and Francis and Francis Ouimet. The golfing

editor of the Times offers the following

comment:

'One and all they swing the club, rather than take it up. There is no suspicion of a hit in wooden club shots or iron shots; there is no trace of “stab" in any putt. Every stroke is part of a well-timed swing. It is most marked in Mr. Jones and Mr. Ouimet, but it is shown clearly by all, and one is left with the impression of a well-balanced, homogeneous company of players, where the wild or uncontrolled shot is a rarity.

'It is certain that they have acquired the fundamental principles of the game, as introduced many years ago by those pioneers who left Carnoustie and took their game to America. It is as certain that our young golfers will never realize their full possibilities until they follow the same plan. The lessons to be learned from Mr. Jones and Mr. Ouimet are, in particular, that accuracy as well as length can be obtained only by pivoting — in other words, by the correct employment of the hips; and that the result without effort can be obtained by a long, slow, even swing that quickens only when close to the ball.

'One was impressed by two more points arising from the swinging stroke that the Americans use first, that they take very little turf with their iron clubs, and secondly, that the flight of the ball off the driver is a "drift" from right to left. A shot from left to right can be learned at any time, but the drift referred to is only common to players who swing at the ball.'

KEYSERLING IN PARIS

FOLLOWING the example of his compatriots, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, Count Keyserling has invaded the so-called intellectual capital of the

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world—the political capital of France - and has lectured there, under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation, on the subject of 'Soul and Spirit.' 'In a masterly improvisation,' says the Nouvelles Littéraires, and with the most complete command, not only of our language, but of our ways of thinking, Count Keyserling outlined a vast picture of the spiritual situation of our period; by a series of happy formulas he traced the various stages which have led us to the point at which we find ourselves, and forcefully defined the duties that confront us; finally, in a conclusion that carried his whole audience with him, he defined the particular rôle that France must play in the "newly emerging world" - a rôle that, because of her heritage, must be nothing short of cardinal.' And thus another link was added to the chain of Franco-German reconciliation.

LE ROI S'AMUSE

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THE motives impelling American débutantes of both sexes to be presented at the Court of St. James are not far to seek. The complacency of royalty during this ordeal is less easy to account for. Possibly a recent news item in the Westminster Gazette may serve to clear the matter up somewhat. Apropos of vaudeville performance being given under the King's patronage, we are informed by a high official that the genial George has a remarkable and truly British sense of fun. "The King,' we are assured, 'thoroughly enjoys real knockabout comedy turns, even when they involve rough-and-tumble business between the comedians. He has the genuine British liking for a man who sits on his hat or has his chair taken from under him. He enjoys acrobatic turns only when there is a large spice of comedy in them.'

BOOKS ABROAD

The Art of Thought, by Graham Wallas. London: Jonathan Cape, 1926. 98.

[The Manchester Guardian]

MR. WALLAS's hand has not lost its cunning. His gifts of apt and ready illustration, often from the most unlikely sources, of whimsical and yet incisive humor, employed in the service of a mind as busy and inquiring as that of a child, combine as attractively as ever with that attitude of calm and settled but rather pessimistic benevolence which is the accepted prerogative of age. He is still, in short, himself; and those who recognized and greeted an original method and a genuine individuality in Human Nature in Politics and The Great Society need only to be told this to know that in The Art of Thought we have a book not to be missed, stimulating, provocative, often annoying a book, doubt, of questions rather than answers, but of questions set by a master in the art.

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It is what is called 'thinking for oneself' that Mr. Wallas has chosen for his subject, and his aim is to discuss various means by which this may be increased and encouraged in the citizens of our modern democracies. He analyzes the growth of a thought into the four stages preparation, incubation, illumination, verification; and he is himself mainly interested in the second and third of these, which are clearly less open to conscious and voluntary regulation than the first and fourth. On the basis of this analysis he treats the problem in succession from a number of different angles, but relying always mainly for help on recent psychological work. He has no sympathy with 'mechanist' psychological theories, of which he hopes that psychology is now ridding itself, and on the other hand he has little belief in what we ordinarily call philosophy, though his instances of creative thinkers are often chosen from the philosophers of the past. His hopes rest on what he calls, after Professor Nunn, a 'hormic conception' of the human organism. He pursues this conception through a number of familiar topics, on which he has always something original and suggestive to say: the relation of thought to emotion, the place of habit, the importance of 'fringethoughts,' the meaning of energy of thought, national peculiarities in thought, dissociation, and religious mysticism, and so on. Finally, he winds up with three chapters on education which may be said to have a dual theme-first, the

possibilities of psychology as a factor in education, and, secondly, the problem of the supernormal child in the State-organized educational system.

Mr. Wallas says that he was once rebuked by an American pupil for attempting to teach 'psychology in the vernacular.' The phrase is a happy description of his method, to which we do not share the American's objection. Mr. Wallas is not a professed psychologist, and he is not writing psychology. He is writing chiefly for students, hoping to help them in the use of their minds, and for those who have the care of students, a class which in a modern democracy may be said to include all active citizens. To all these his book should be valuable; but it should be read especially by those who are interested, professionally or otherwise, in secondary education. The concluding sketch, confessedly somewhat Utopian, of a secondary school, under public management, for the one per cent of highly gifted children, has a charm and suggestiveness that are rare in educational literature.

Fairy Gold, by Compton Mackenzie. London: Cassell's, 1926. 7s. 6d.

[Daily Telegraph]

AGAINST a wonderful background of a Cornish island, Mr. Mackenzie has used the old plot of thwarted lovers to write one of the most delightful of stories. All the familiar ingredients are there, the soldier lover, the beautiful heroine, the irate parent, the rich suitor who through his profiteer father has fixed the heroine's hand as the price of saving the family fortunes, — but so cunningly has Mr. Mackenzie mixed them that one seems to be reading all this for the time first, and even secures an authentic thrill when hidden treasure is discovered and the lovers are safely united, to the discomfiture and humiliation of the profiteer. Fairy Gold is an apt title, for the story moves in lights and shades of mysterious beauty, recalling irresistibly the nights of Verona, where fairies keep their watch over true love. There is a splendid sincerity about it all that gives the old plot a peculiar strength and makes these romantic lovers completely credible, especially as with cunning art Mr. Mackenzie sets them among types that come straight from life: the only too real dugout colonel, the old gardener, and the old boatman, the C3 garrison, the cheeky but completely delightful imp Venetia, and the fat, suave,

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