ward in all his letters and conversations. Even the words would be reItained, so deep and vivid was the impression of his thought in its first form. If one of his chords was struck, it sounded ever after with remarkable exI actness in the same tone, and these ready-made phrases were a great aid to the secretary who had to transcribe them. He could see them coming just like the theme of a rondo, and a single sign was enough to mark their place.

'If the Emperor stepped out of his cabinet, his secretary would employ the moment thus left at his disposal to set the papers on the writing-table in order and to collect the answered letters with which the floor was strewn. He was also able to read them over and check most I accurately what he had written. In doubtful cases the expression and the circumstances of the petition would show the exact sense of the answer. A secretary was only too glad to be able to set his dictation in order by such means, for it was hard to catch it on the wing. Napoleon, for example, would occasionally confuse technical expressions and proper names so that they were quite unrecognizable. He would often say "Elbe" for "Ebro," "Salamanca" for "Smolensk "and vice versa. I no longer recollect what Polish word in his vocabulary represented Badajoz, but I do remember that when he spoke of Rysope he meant the stronghold of Osopo.'

There were restful intervals in the work when Napoleon would break off for short periods to take up a book, but the arrival of a notice or a dispatch often brought a stormy interview of which Baron Fain gives a vivid and amusing description:

"Various secretaries would be called in, pen in hand, and before they had had a chance to find seats the Emperor

would call out: "Write!" They could hardly get down quick enough the ideas that streamed from his lips. Napoleon would go from one to another dictating. Ménéval would be writing an answer to a Marshal, Fain an order to a Minister, Monnier the outline of a decree, d'Albe an article to appear in the next morning's Moniteur, while his aid-de-camp was writing an order for hasty dispatch. He would have done still more dictating, but revision did not go so fast as dictation, and a larger number of secretaries was impractical. A first letter would be laid before him for signature, he would sign it, call for a courier, fold the letter himself, and perhaps burn his fingers if he tried to seal it in person.'

This was his way of working in Paris, and when possible he kept the same staff with him in the field. The first copy of a report on a battle was always sent to the Empress. He never let a bag for a courier close without putting in a word for his wife, though it was always a great trial to him to write legibly.

Even after his fall he kept up the custom of dictating. Immediately on arriving at St. Helena and before settling in Longwood, while he was still at The Briars, the countryseat of the merchant Balcombe, where he had temporary residence, he began to work on his memoirs. He would dictate them to his chamberlain, LasCases, whose son Emmanuel also served sometimes as secretary. Later at Longwood other gentlemen took his dictation, especially Montholon, to whom on the fifteenth of April, 1821, he dictated his will. One day later, with his own hand he wrote a short codicil. A few days after, his condition began to grow steadily worse. On the thirtieth of April for the first time his mind was confused, and the weary struggle with death began which was to last until the fifth of May.

To the ordinary mind, Gross's drawings correspond with his name, but to his sympathizers he appears rather as an idealist, though the drawings which give visible form to his ideals are acridly harsh and bitter. Gross devotes himself to the more advanced phases of Expressionism and preaches specifically the doctrines of the German branch of the Dada cult. Further explanation must be left to Herr Gross himself, for these doctrines are strictly caviar - or or at least fishy-to the general. His explanations are hardly intelligible to the lay mind. That way madness lies for all save Dadaist brains, which may be mad already (unless they are merely inclined to hoaxing, a suspicion from which they are by no means free).

The Communist has occasionally elicited favorable comment even from his bourgeois foes, as for example when he drew the scenery for Georg Kaiser's play, Folk-Piece, 1923, presented at the Lustspielhaus in Berlin last December. The vigor of the drawing partly accounts for this success, which was likewise aided by the restraining hand of a stern stage-manager, who contrived to eliminate some of the usual brutality.

A few months ago Gross and his publishers were haled into court on a

charge of 'wounding the moral susceptibilities of normal persons.' (The conventional superiority of European comment upon similar occurrences in our own country rises ironically in the American mind.) Gross had published a collection of a hundred cartoons representing the baser aspects of life in Berlin. A Socialist deputy of the Reichstag aided by another attorney undertook the defense. Max Osborn, the art critic, and Maximilian Harden, editor of Die Zukunft, were called as witnesses for the defense. Both were unanimous in their tributes to the artist, but the presiding judge would none of them. This is part of his comment, which has a very familiar ring in American ears:

'Many deplorable things will always be happening in this world; of that there can be no question. Grown-up people know it very well. But what artistic justification is there for depicting these things with so little conceal

BOURGEOIS

A Gross Cartoon from Clarté

ment? Surely you will admit that the artist must impose a limit upon his own work! If he wishes to create something for himself at home, well and good, let him do so. But if he ventures on publicity, then he should remember that certain limits must be observed.

This kind of thing . . . for private purposes, quite all right. But for the public eye, it won't do at all. Besides, we may hope and trust that scenes like those depicted here are of very rare occurrence.'

Gross entered the plea, which is at least as familiar as the judge's solemnly Puritanic observations, that 'such limits do not exist for the artist.' If Mr. Mencken criticized the German arts as he does the American, what would he say to all this?

In an address published in the French Communist weekly Clarté - one of the three founders of which was Henri Barbusse, author of The SquadGross describes the successive stages of his artistic development. The conventional forms of art he early cast aside as quite useless and without significance, partly because he thought they had been pushed to the wall by the advancing technique of mere pictorial reproduction, represented by photography and the motion picture. A hater of the whole human race, he sought to create a fresh technique which would enable him to strike his enemies blows that should cut deep: 'I began to make sketches which were to reflect the hatred that I then felt. I designed, for example, a table occupied by habitués at Siechem's, with men like great masses of flesh, engulfed in abominable gray clothes. To achieve a style that would render harsh grotesqueness and truth and the antipathy I sought to express, I studied immediate manifestations of the artistic instinct. I copied ordinary people's drawings on the walls of public places, for these

seemed to me expressions and condensed interpretations of strong feeling. Children's drawings also inspired me because of their naïve quality, and so, little by little, I came to that trenchant style, cutting as a knife, with which I wished to reproduce the observations made under the influence of the allembracing hatred of mankind that I then felt. I noted down in little notebooks my observations in the streets, in cafés, in variety shows. I took great care in making these and occasionally analyzed my impressions, sometimes even in writing.'

Then came a world war, and the comradeship of military service somewhat softened the implacable artistmisanthropist. His drawings found favor among some of his fellow soldiers and his hatred was gradually withdrawn from mankind as a whole and directed only against the enemies of the working classes.

"To-day,' says Gross, 'I no longer hate men without distinction. To-day I hate evil institutions and their defenders, and if I have any hope at all, it is to behold the disappearance of these institutions and of the class which protects them. My work is devoted to this hope. Millions of men share it with me, but obviously they are neither art-amateurs, nor Mæcenases, nor art dealers. People who wish to call my work "art" can do so only if they share my opinions, that is, if they know that the future belongs to the working classes.'

PUGILISTIC OPERA

THE prize ring has at length attained to the dignity of operatic interpretation. No doubt there will be cynics to assert that in rehearsals at least there never has been any great distinction between prize-fighting and grand opera; and some there will be whose memories go

see

The actual fisticuffs the audience hardly if the directions in the score are faithfully observed as the protagonists fight in the midst of a crowd of villagers. But the whoop of the Showman, a high baritone, of an octave portamento to F sharp, when he asks the pair of fighters in the ring if they are ready, the unaccompanied drum-roll while they spar, the comments of the onlookers in double chorus, the strings and wood-wind showing their agitation in triplets, while the trumpets (so far as one may guess from a piano score) have a rythmical common time figure of three notes, and the orchestra's sudden rise of a semitone to the call of 'Time' - all these make a promising first round.

Then Mary, whom they are fighting for did I not say it was a romantic opera? intervenes with a little sentiment in the key of C sharp minor, and almost before we know it the strings are off again in the second round, with their triplet figures. We modulate from C minor to A major as Hugh begins to punish the villain John. One chorus applauds Hugh in C major followed by the other cheering John, but less definitely in the major key. John is

beginning to get the worst of it. There is a sudden heightening of feeling as John tries to use his knee and the violins rise to the high C when the Showman, in quick recitative, stops the fight. But Hugh insists on continuing, and, after an agitated double chorus has risen to a climax fff John is duly knocked out to a cry portamento, beginning on the high F sharp. The Showman counts him out on the F sharp of the octave below, and the spectators' exultation is shown by an upward scale passage on the orchestra through four octaves, ending with a salutation 'Hugh the Drover.'

DINING WITH PIERRE LOTI

As most of his readers know, Pierre Loti carried his love of the exotic into his own home, dividing his house, room by room, to represent various epochs of architecture, so that one could pass successively from Egyptian and Arab art through the Italian Renaissance and eventually appreciate the severe graces of medieval France.

In these odd yet picturesque surroundings Loti loved to receive his friends and delighted in devising fantastic entertainments. The Journal des Débats prints his invitation to a dinner which was to be served comme sous le roi Louis XI:

"You love times gone past and perhaps will allow yourself to be ever so little entertained by this faithful reproduction of the fifteenth century. There will be some thirty of us. Let us dine by the light of pine torches in a rough-hewn Gothic hall powdered with the dust of centuries. We shall eat the dishes of the period: roast heron and roast hedgehog shall be brought by pages to the sound of the horn and the cornemuse. One of my minstrels will chant, among other things, a villanelle by François Coppée.

'No one may come except in the strict costume of the period. The