the ire of German playwrights if their English confrères continue to hold the attention of German audiences as steadily as they have done latterly. At one time not long ago three English plays were running simultaneously in Berlin theatres - Mr. Galsworthy's Loyalties (somewhat inaccurately translated Gesellschaft), Mr. Shaw's Saint Joan, and Mr. Somerset Maugham's Rain. The first of these was staged with elaborate and studious care by Max Reinhardt at the Komödie theatre. "The play, which,' as a writer in the Daily Telegraph observes, 'is after all a fairly broad piece of work, hardly bears the strain of all this finesse.'

The production of Saint Joan was a revival, — it had run for something like two hundred nights, an unheard-of period for Berlin, when first produced,

but Rain was seen for the first time there this winter. It was not a complete success, to judge from the reactions of critics, who were perhaps not equipped to appreciate the peculiarly 'Anglo-Saxon' problem it treats. Rain was also a Reinhardt production. "The detail of the setting,' says the Telegraph's correspondent, 'is preRaphaelite in its exactness, and the small parts are as scrupulously considered as the leading rôles. . . . The play was fairly well attended, but I heard many hardened theatregoers complain of its unpleasantness; and even those unmoved by patriotic feelings to object to foreign plays see no reason why plays so unedifying as this should be imported.'

ON EVENING DRESS

...

AN anonymous woman writer in the Spectator not long ago, attacking mas

culine costuming on many grounds, reiterated a common protest against the evening clothes worn by men, as stiff, ugly, drab, and uncomfortable. In passing, she praised Mr. Arnold Bennett for having, as she said, worn a dark-purple dinner-jacket for many years-only to draw forth an indignant disavowal from that distinguished man of letters, and the assertion that her remark was nothing short of libelous.

Apparently there are other reasons for holding such costume objectionable. A controversy has raged in England over the question whether Labor leaders should wear formal evening dress. Mr. Robert Lynd, writing in the Daily News, disposes of this different aspect of the question:

As regards evening clothes, I confess quite frankly that I possess them, and that I feel no sudden inflow of vice into my system when I put them on to go out to dinner. If I have any criminal tendencies, they flourish as freely when I am in my shabbiest suit as when I am wearing a white waistcoat. Nor do my politics change with my clothes any more than my morals do.

The truth is, all the denunciations of evening dress as though it were the mark of a snob and an antidemocrat to wear it are nonsense. It is no more snobbish or undemocratic to possess a dress-suit than to possess a gramophone. It is no more snobbish to put on evening clothes than to put on cricket flannels or a football jersey.

A man who cannot preserve his political principles in a dress-suit has no political principles worth preserving. Artists who dress ostentatiously like artists are not always the best artists, and democrats who dress ostentatiously like democrats are not always the best democrats. The abolition of rags, not the abolition of glad rags, is the true object of democracy.

The Plumed Serpent, by D. H. Lawrence.

London: Martin Secker; New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $3.00.

JUDGMENTS of Mr. Lawrence's work have been, from the beginning, as various and irreconcilable as its judges. In regard to The Plumed Serpent they range from the view of a Spectator critic who holds that 'if this writing up of a new faith is intended for a message, then it is only a paltry one,' to the view of a writer in the Daily Telegraph who, admitting that Mr. Lawrence's undisciplined pathological interest keeps the book from being great literature, declares that 'page after page here is unique, and even unapproachable.' Mr. H. C. Harwood's review in the Outlook is representatively judicious:

Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of forty, whom since her husband's death life has ceased to interest, comes to Mexico. The country and the people repel her; nor is her temper made smoother by the fact that her companions are Americans who can never refuse a new sensation. How she loathes dirt and oppression and under dogs and cruelty and crowds and revolutions and politics and and everything. Civilization is a bore, and its absence a torment. She is swept by gusts of rage. But two men interest her. One is Don Ramon, a cultivated gentleman of European descent. The other is Don Cipriano, a full-blooded Indian general. These two men are up to something. She stays in Mexico to see what it is. They intend to supersede Christianity by the worship of the Aztec gods, and they succeed. Ramon is the high priest of Quetzalcoatl, the feathery serpent, and, esoterically, Quetzalcoatl himself. Cipriano is Huitzilopochtli. Kate, promised an apparently subordinate part in the Pantheon, is in love with both, but marries only the latter.

It will now be unnecessary for me to explain that The Plumed Serpent is not

everybody's pet. If you have never read Lawrence and do not want to, or if you have read him but think him an overrated rhetorician, or if you deplore the fact that he gave up writing about coal-heavers, or if you think Sons and Lovers superior to Women in Love, or if, while agreeing that Mr. Lawrence is a great novelist, you do wish that he would write about nice things, or if you are preoccupied by planning the speech you are to make at the local literary society on 'John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett: which is the greater?' — then I cannot honestly recommend The Plumed Serpent to you, or ask you to bother yourself with what I have to say. The descriptions of Mexico are as good and as convincing as they could be made. But, unless you believe that Mr. Lawrence's romantic quest for a novel and more intense way of living is approximately the most important thing in contemporary literature, occasional descriptive passages will not compensate you for being bored by a long, profoundly obscure, and often tedious book.

What, however, will admirers of Mr. Lawrence make of The Plumed Serpent? They will agree, I think, that the author has not advanced from the Kangaroo stage. His imagination has not mastered his theme. As ever, he rises at all sorts of unexpected. moments to an emotional intensity and a fierce, intuitional understanding, parallels with which can be found in no other living author. But the inspiration comes in lightning flashes. After each flash is no steady flame to light us. We plunge on and he plunges on through the darkness of chaos. When all allowances are made for Mr. Lawrence's innate mysticism, for the difficulties he meets when he tries to express his ideas in other than emotional terms, and for his unhappily increasing contempt of technique, it remains apparent that Mr. Lawrence has not advanced on his quest. Perhaps his wandering about the world is to blame. He has traveled too

much in the body, and has not the energy to spare for his spiritual travels. The Plumed Serpent leaves us where Kangaroo did - delighted, bewildered.

What is Mr. Lawrence's quest? It is primarily romantic. The prayer of one of his characters, 'Would that the world would explode like a bomb!' is his own prayer. He cannot tolerate the philosophy content to crawl along the dead metallic surface of the world without apprehension of the immense forces stored within. Better destruction, he seems to imply, than contentment. Better nothing than the second best.

Mr. Lawrence wants to get below the surfaces of life. He is infuriated, actually infuriated, by their complexity. If he hates cruelty, as The Plumed Serpent shows, we know that he hates kindliness none the less. Nothing short of a passionate simplicity will content him. He is a poet. He wants life to be a savage lyric.

At first he tried to find what scientists call truth and theologians God and philosophers the absolute in personal relationships. His earliest works are determined by his belief in the high importance of human beings and their contacts. Of these contacts the sexual was not the most serious. The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers are proofs of that. Still throughout Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent we can find traces of this old trend in the discussion of the love of disciple for prophet.

The personal relations in general broke down under the weight of emphasis Mr. Lawrence laid upon them, and he began in The Rainbow to concentrate on the sexual relationship. Certainly this is, phenomenally, the most emotional. The secrecy, moreover, in which it is for the sake of decency swaddled was bound to attract a romanticist. But Mr. Lawrence is temperamentally hostile to an intimacy that necessitates sacrifice. His men can never meet women on equal terms. They must command, and wooing and comradeship are old and honorable if they do not degrade them. (In The Plumed Serpent the new worship of Quetzalcoatl produces a new marriage-rite in which the woman is taught her place indeed. It may also be observed that neither of the two women there to

whom places in the Aztec Olympus are opened are ever actually allowed promotion to the rank of goddess.) A Freudian would say that Mr. Lawrence had imperfectly succeeded in overcrowding his dislike of sex as something improper. . . Anyhow, in Aaron's Rod Mr. Lawrence repudiated it. Since then he has been looking for something to take its place.

The third stage has been Mr. Lawrence's subscription to a pseudo-scientific and confusedly metaphysical theory of glands and ganglions. As there has been a hangover from the first stage, so there has been one from the second. Mr. Lawrence still writes about sex. But it makes a good working-guide to his symbolism if we opine that whenever he mentions sex he means something else, and whenever he mentions something else he means sex. His faith is in a dark inner life, independent of the intellect, independent of the ordinary emotions; in an antediluvian age when men walked with soft feet over lost continents; in something that makes all races one and men one with the lower animals; in what scientists call truth and theologians God and philosophers reality, but Mr. Lawrence is as yet unable to define or to illustrate.

Mr. Lawrence's root difficulty is that he is not a philosopher any more than a scientist, and that his indifference to religion is no less complete than surprising. Nearly all romanticists tend to found a new cult when they do not accept an old. Mr. Lawrence is not even an agnostic. His mysticism is curiously devoid of any reference to the supernatural. He looks down at the loins, when most men of his type would look up to the heavens. The revival of Quetzalcoatl-worship gave him the opportunity of inventing a new religious ritual. This ritual is elaborate, and some of the hymns used in it lovely; but a military gymkhana has more of the religious spirit. Is Mr. Lawrence bound, as some think, to turn to religion in the end? Or will he invent, as Shelley did, with Plato's aid, a substituted emotion? Or is he doomed to quest but never find, to blunder, babbling great poems and stories, about an unsympathetic world for all the length of his life? Who can say?

-

Aricie Brun, by Emile Henriot. Translated by Henry Longan Stuart. New York: The Viking Press. $2.00.

In every novel that deals with successive generations, whether the tone be gay or sad, the reader is conscious of a pervasive melancholy. He is depressed because he is forcibly reminded of the narrow confines of human life. In describing the family the author has inevitably robbed each individual of some of his individuality. The reader feels his own ego shrink unpleasantly. The nobility and devoted kindness of Aricie Brun soften but do not diminish this feeling. Her sacrifice, with the frustration it entails, awakens a pity that is lost in the deeper tragedy that the book suggests. Is not Aricie's conception of the family an illusion? Is she not deluded again when she sacrifices herself? Does this mean that all our neat human categories, all the values that we attach to life to give it meaning, may be equally illusory? Perhaps. This, however, is probably not a question the author intended to raise. His purpose is to show us the life during one hundred years of a French bourgeois family. That he received the award of the Académie Française is a tribute to his success. His is a careful, methodical piece of work without either the brilliance or the bitterness that Louis Couperus brought to Small Souls. These small souls of France are dimmer. And as Aricie grows older we find that, less loyal than she, we have forgotten the comrades of her youth. Her death comes as a relief.

The Hounds of Spring, by Sylvia Thompson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. (An Atlantic Monthly Publication.) $2.00.

AFTER the less mature early chapters, this novel is an engrossing combination of great events in a narrative driven forward with a skilled rein, and of a wide gallery of living persons who include most of the types and fates, young and old, of whom one could easily think. The picture of the war gathering into one passionate current the earnestly serene English family of the naturalized Austrian, Sir Edgar Renner, his wife, his son John, Colin, the beloved of the elder daughter

Zina, the enfeebled and starving brother in Vienna, the American nurse Hope Chase, and a number of others of varying destinies and sorts, is a picture made memorable by the author's singularly actual and living understanding and her grasp of the problems of story-telling and character-drawing. Most readers will discover certain mannerisms of style and questionable turns of plot or delineation. But the book is remarkably successful in several cardinal traits of the novel. It is interesting; its story drives forward, a high picture of tragic conflicts and desperate remedies; and its theme war and peace, with their coil of circumstance and passion - sweeps through a large variety of very animated and persuasive human figures. Especially able is the characterization of Wendy, the younger daughter of Sir Edgar Renner. A child when the war comes on, a child when her brother is killed, she sounds the concluding note of the volume on Remembrance Day 1924, in the midst of her career at Oxford, as a girl whom the social critic may greet with hope, despair, admiration, or contempt, at choice or by turns -a free, arrogant, understanding, young, wounded, and self-reliant woman of the present age, too keenly aware of what the world has lost and of the sanctities it needs to gain.

From Dawes to Locarno, by George Glasgow. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1926. $2.50. A WELL-DOCUMENTED, up-to-the-minute book describing British and European diplomacy from the date when Austen Chamberlain became Foreign Minister in Mr. Baldwin's Cabinet, less than eighteen months ago, to the signing of the Locarno Agreement one year later. It is written in the flush of post-Locarno optimism, and upon the whole is the better for that reason. Something of the attitude of the author appears in the dedication to those who worked for and produced the spirit of Locarno, and in particular to Mr. Austen Chamberlain, M. Aristide Briand, Dr. Luther, Dr. Stresemann, Dr. Edward Benes, M. Emile Vandervelde, Count Skrzynski, and to Signor Mussolini, over whom more tears have been shed in Heaven than over the others.' A foreword by J. Ramsay Macdonald is printed elsewhere in this issue of the Living Age.

DURING the latter part of April and the early part of May, the several Swiss cantons will be holding their open-air parliamentary meetings or Landsgemeinden at the usual places.

The eighth annual Swedish fair will be held in Gothenburg between the sixth and the thirteenth of May, with exhibits of all the most important industries of Sweden, as well as extensive exhibits of handicrafts and textiles.

Madame Melba's farewell concert in Great Britain will take place at Albert Hall during the month of May.

Important fairs will be held in France in May. At Rennes the fifth annual Commercial, Industrial, and Agricultural Exposition and Fair will be held from April 24 to May 2. Sens will be the scene of a fifth annual Fair of Agricultural Machinery and Wine-growing from April 30 to May 4. At Tours from May 8 to 16 and at Besançon from May 8 to 17 similar fairs will be held, though the official title varies from place to place.

The twenty-fourth Labor Exhibition in Alsace will run from May to July.

At Paris, from May 8 to 23, a fourth Annual Exhibition of Musical Instruments will be held at the Place de la Bourse.

Several of the famous religious festivals of Brittany known as 'Pardons' will be celebrated during the month. The so-called 'Pardon of the Birds' will be an event of the fifth Sunday after Easter, May 9, at Quimperlé; it takes place in a lovely wooded vale that swarms with song-birds.

The Pardon of Saint Yves will take place on Wednesday, May 19, at Paimpol. Whitsunday and Monday, May 23 and 24, will be the occasion of a festival at Montcontour; the chief feature of this pardon is the dancing of the Breton dances to the tunes of the 'Biniou' (a kind of local bagpipe) on the magnificent esplanade of the Château des Granges. A similar celebration will be going on simultaneously at Chapelle Saint Carré. Saint Eloi (near Sizun) will hold its so-called Pardon of Horses on May 27. At Saint Herbot (near Huelgoat) on May 28 a very curious pardon will take place: peasants make offerings to the saint of tufts of hair taken from the tails of cattle in order to ensure his protection.

The International Labor Conference will be held in May at Geneva.

There will be a Singing Festival of the Canton of Berne at Interlaken from May 15 to 17.

International Horse-racing will be an event at Zurich on May 30, as well as during the summer, on June 6 and August 1.

Travelers planning to be in the Scandinavian countries early in the summer will not want to miss the Baltic Fair to be held at Stockholm the week of June 14-20. In this fair will participate Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland SO that it richly deserves its title. It will be an industrial and commercial fair, and the city is planning on the presence of a great many visitors from abroad.