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The article presents the author's views on artists. The author states that no artist actually enjoys ideal conditions, and the dramatist is particularly unfortunate in this respect. In the first place, he requires the cooperation of a whole staff of interpretative artists and artisans through whose hands his conception must pass before it can reach an audience. In the second place, the production of any play is tremendously expensive and involves a commercial undertaking larger than that in which any other artist-except the architect-needs to be involved. Hence it is that the drama depends upon "the show business" to an extent infinitely greater than any novel can depend upon "the book business" or any painting upon "the art business."

The article presents an overview of the situation of theaters in New York City. A glance at the newspaper any time during the summer just past would, however, have revealed the startling fact that only six or seven of the seventy theaters were actually in operation and there were periods during what should have been the height of last winter's season when thirty or forty playhouses were either dark or given over to vaudeville, burlesque, or moving-picture entertainments.

The article focuses on the book "The Essential Shakespeare," by J. Dover Wilson. Shakespeare's "literary attainments and success were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of making permanent provision for himself and his daughters. That view of his interests is, as Wilson points out, the culmination of a tendency which goes as far back as Halliwell-Phillipps, but it is also, as he points out still further, neither inherently probable nor necessarily to be deduced from the meager facts and supposed facts upon which it is allegedly founded. In the first place, Shakespeare's father was a prosperous and prominent man in Stratford.

The article focuses on the book "Portraits," by Desmond MacCarthy. The book contains essays which deal which is concerned with Anatole France and his late conversion to Communist dogmas. Here again the point is not one which has to do with either the usefulness or the dangers of dogmas in themselves, but with the fact that they half destroyed France for the simple reason that they were inappropriate. The man who had rejected all systems of thought had no right suddenly to embrace one and he could not really embrace opinions.

This article briefly discusses the book "Two or Three Graces," by Aldous Huxley. Mr. Aldous Huxley, probably the most intelligent of les fauves, exhibits alternately the two moods, the disdainful and the explosive, of his mind. In the first he is an aloof satirist regarding human follies with an air of great detachment and describing them in a style of limpid simplicity; in the second the mask drops from his face and reveals the pain which lies behind it. Tolerant contempt gives way to ferocious hatred, classic irony to raging disgust, and the author descends from his Olympian height to struggle desperately with the problems which he had mocked others for not solving.

The article presents an overview of the book "Rough Justice," by C.E. Montague. "Rough Justice" is a capital expression of the faith of those who believe that England, with all her faults, is still the cradle of the only virtue a pure and a courageous heart--that really counts. Mr. Montague writes well, though often a little too much like a man who has been praised for his style, and occasionally, in the earlier parts dealing with his hero's childhood, he writes like one who knows he has been called "whimsical."

The article focuses on the book "Bread and Circuses," by W.E. Woodward. Woodward is one of those who, having discovered that the world is all wrong, are in the best of all possible positions for enjoying it thoroughly. Both the ancient task of justifying the ways of God to man and that more characteristically modern one of justifying ways of man to God are sufficiently difficult to disturb the equanimity and ruin the temper of anyone intelligent enough to comprehend the problem, but there is much to be enjoyed by those who can wash their hands of all responsibility for either eternal justice or the goodness of the human heart.

This article focuses on the book "Dead Reckonings in Fiction," by Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell. Brewster and Burrell imply without exactly stating, the real test of the value of any critical theory is not the judgments which it leads us to pronounce but the enrichments of aesthetic experience which it enables us to make. Its value must be determined not by its completeness and truth but pragmatically by the fruitfulness of the attempts to apply it, since a theory which, however true, remains barren in its applications is of no particular value.

This article presents information about several dramas. "In a Garden" is an ambitiously fanciful play which deals with the story of the wife of a play-Wright who finally felt herself constrained to leave him because his analytical mind and his inveterate habit of playing everything as a scene crushed all the joyous spontaneity of life. It is only moderately successful because it is itself more full of ingenuity than of vitality. "Solid Ivory" is a slangy play of base-ball and neither very subtle nor very original.

This article focuses on the book "Dark Laughter," by Sherwood Anderson. In many a passage of "Dark Laughter," especially in those which describe the life along the river, he has caught it with a nearly flawless art, and realizing that it is an attitude to be felt rather than a philosophy to be intellectually defended or understood he has wisely refrained from argument and left it to be symbolized by that mellow, careless laughter with which the Negroes, the perfect vagabonds, greet the situations over which those of another race puzzle their heads and search their hearts.

This article focuses on three books. The book "Faber, Or the Lost Years," by Jacob Wassermann, has three hundred and fifty pages of ordinary type which serve to tell its story contrast strikingly with the huge bulk of the book "The World's Illusion," and a similar restraint is evident both in the conception of the characters and in the handling of the plot. The article also talks about the books "The Island of the Great Mother," by Gerhart Hauptmann and "Fräulein Else," by Arthur Schnitzler.

This article focuses on the book "Edgar Allan Poe Letters, Till Now Unpublished, in the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia," with introductory essay and commentary by Mary Newton Stanard. No American author has been so assiduously studied as Edgar Allan Poe, and yet even today, three-quarter of a century after his death, there still remain unpublished documents which are absolutely essential to the full understanding of his career. No future judgment of Poe's character will be worth considering if it does not take these letters into account, but there will, it appears, remain some difference of opinion.

The article focuses on the book "The Venetian Glass Nephew," by Elinor Wylie. The purpose of Mrs. Wylie's charming fantasy is to capture in a poet's mind a moment of beauty in the declining Renaissance. A previous novel has shown how skillfully she can catch the flavor, half absurd and wholly delightful, of a vanished society; and now her imagination, flitting from age to age in a search for delicate perfumes, has lit upon Venice at that moment in the eighteenth century when its twilight charm was fading before the garish beams of French enlightenment.

The article focuses on the book "Wanderings," by Robert Herrick. In 1895 Robert Herrick, then a young American idealist, published his first essay in fiction. Since then he has come a long and sorrowful journey, marking in novel after novel the stages of his increasing bitterness and disillusion until now in three of the four short novels which constitute "Wanderings" he has reached an ultimate pessimism. None of his works has achieved absolute greatness, none is sure of a permanent place in American literature.

When on the fourth day after the opening of the famous trial at Dayton, lawyer Clarence Darrow arose with the characteristic hitch of his shoulders and began his first electrical speech, a tremor went through the assembled army of newspapermen as they awoke with a start from the spell, which Dayton had cast upon them. So calm was the confidence of the little town, so indisputably real were the proceedings, which had seemed at a little distance utterly preposterous that one was on the point of taking the trial with certain seriousness not merely as a social phenomenon, but as a discussion of a real question.

Even those who do not happen, like the present writer, to have been born and bred in Tennessee should not find it difficult to forgive Dayton, a tiny town set in the midst of fruitful strawberry fields in Tennessee. Its faith is no narrower than that of every other community equally remote; its temper is better than was the temper of Oxford half a century ago; and if some of its inhabitants turn to the law to protect their children against the teaching of a dangerous theory, it is with a simplicity of mind which has no conception of the questions of academic freedom involved.

The article focuses on two books "Serena Blandish: or The Difficulty of Getting Married," by a Lady of Quality, and "Mayfair," by Michael Arlen. "Serena Blandish" is, as the pseudonym might suggest, cast mockingly into the mold of the classical conte. Mrs. Behn recounted amorous tales in this same grave manner, and Restif de la Bretonne managed through the use of similar means to give to his stories piquancy not wholly in accord with the exemplary lessons in practical morality which they professed to teach. In "Mayfair" Mr. Michael Arlen has managed somehow to display at full length all his vices' as a writer arid to conceal completely the virtues which in some of his books, particularly "The Green Hat," deserved the acclaim which they received.

The article presents information on the book "The Spring Flight," by Lee J. Smits. No type of the contemporary novel is so assiduously cultivated in America as that of which Floyd Dell's "Moon Calf" is the best-known example. Literally dozens of young men have written the autobiography of their youth with but little attempt to disguise the source of their material, and though they have not in most cases shown any evidence of that large imaginative grasp which makes the genuine novelist by giving him the power to participate in the lives of others, they have, in a surprising number of cases, written what they had to write extremely well.

This article presents information on the book " Arrowsmith," by Sinclair Lewis. It might have been reasonably objected against Sinclair Lewis that in his two pictures of mediocrity triumphant he failed to recognize one important fact. In spite of all the optimism which lay behind his satires he made his heroes succumb with surprising ease to the dullness which surrounded them, and he seemed never to be aware of that almost magical sureness with which something boin in the natural artist or in the natural scientist enables him to seek and find the best in most unlikely places.

The article provides information on two books, "Death in Venice," by Thomas Mann, translated by Kenneth Burke; "Jonah," by Robert Nathan. The very title "Death in Venice" evokes immediately the gravely sensuous mood which pervades the book, and each story, dealing as it does with the physical or spiritual death of an artist in the midst of the failing splendors of his art, is a sort death in Venice. Robert Nathan's "Jonah" is an ironic fantasy upon the life of the Biblical hero. It gets its charm from a mingling of satire and sympathy in the treatment of Old Testament characters as seen through the eyes of a modern Jew who smiles at the tribal narrowness of their ideas while warming to their humanity.

This article presents information on the book "The Grand Inquisitor," by Donald Douglas. The book indicates that Whoever pours the solvent of thought upon the visible world will find it melting away, and whoever, rasher yet, applies to it the explosive of passion is destined to see it rent before his eyes. No philosopher yet ever thought long about a table or a stone without reducing it to something which the eye cannot see or the brain imagine, without making of it the shadow of an idea or a swarm of atomic meteors; no man ever lived long in the world of emotions without finding that feelings alone are solid and unquestionable things.

The article focuses on the book "Those Barren Leaves," by Aldous Huxley. The English house-party is conducted upon a broadly tolerant principle. In the book as in a previous work, Huxley takes advantage of it and is able to bring together in the Italian villa of an English lady a marvelous menagerie which includes, among others, a lady novelist, an aging parasite, a gilded youth and the impecunious editor. Of each he draws an unforgettable satiric portrait, and in their company he continues his search for his soul.

The article presents information about various theatrical productions. An impressive amount of energy, enthusiasm, and talent has been lavished upon the production of drama "Beyond". Artist Helen Gahagan and Walter Able, interpreting the two characters who are the complete dramatis personae, speak their lines with what seems to be a nudging conviction of their importance, and they play with a statuesque dignity which constitutes a perfect achievement of the abstract style for which the play seems to call. At the Eltinge Theater Artist Lionel Barrymore is appearing with artist Irene Fenwick in the drama "The Piker." Two elaborate operettas have been produced recently. "China Rose" is extremely dull. "The Love Song" has a score based upon the music of Offenbach. It is lavish, brightly tuneful, and sometimes amusing.

The article presents information about the books "The Clock," by Aleksei Remizov and "Tales of the Wilderness," by Boris Pilniak, translated by F. O'Demsey with an introduction by Prince D.S. Mirsky. Mirsky begins his introduction to "Tales of the Wilderness" with the statement that the English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian literature and then, as he proceeds to discuss the prose writers and comes very near to saying that they are not worth knowing. Politically, perhaps, Russia has taken on a new life but literature is a slower growth than government and artistically she is still hesitating between the dead world and the world which is still powerless to be born.

This article focuses on the drama "Carnival." Once the actress son made for herself a reputation in an emotional role, and since then she has determined to be emotional at all cost. In the present play she waves her arms, she clenches her fists, she taps her feet, and her voice thrills with emotion; but no one can possibly care a whit because the play-all about a stunning lady who dreams of high adventure and steals the brifltest jewel from a princess's crown-is about as near to any relationship with life as the marble-topped and plush-covered elegance of the scene in which it takes place is near to beauty.

This article focuses on the drama "Old English." George Arliss, who undertakes the task of giving Old English a bodily form, has seldom had a role better fitted to his talents. He is an actor at his best in something which is probably less a reasoned impersonation than a projection of his own idealized self into a congenial role, and he acts crisp, domineering men well because he obviously enjoys seeming one. ft is a dangerous method; responsible for some of the worst acting in the world by players who might be more properly described as strutting rather than acting.

This article focuses on the book "The Enemies of Liberty," by E.S.P. Haynes. Haynes's book is both provocative and, in its discussion of the specific forms assumed today by the repressive forces, sound. It suffers, however, on the theoretical side from two implied fallacies: First, the assumption that a free expression of the majority will would result in the greatest possible freedom of the individual; and second, the assumption that logic suffices to make clear the distinction between unjust repressions and those infringements of liberty which are necessary and good.

The article focuses on William Wycherley's english comedy "The Way of the World." No other drama requires of both actors and audience so delicate a perception of an artificial style as the drama of the Restoration, and no other Restoration play is quite as difficult as this one. For forty years before it was written the English theater had been, as it never was before or since, the exchisive possession of an idle aristocracy, arid the genius of its dramatic writers was devoted to no other task than that of mirroring as best it could the riotous carnival into which the return of the Merry Monarch had plunged his court.

If any critic in a future age should happen to read the manuscript of "Close Harmony" he would probably be at a loss to understand why the obviously capable authors of the piece chose to burden themselves with a hero weak to the point of insignificance and with a social background dull to the point of imbecility. Recently, it is true, the American intellectual has exhibited a passionate interest in dullness and has shown a strange inclination to consider the man who can imitate it closely as the most diverting of wits. The other offerings of the week contain little worthy of remark. Cosmo Hamilton's "Parasites" follows the safe formula which calls for scandal tempered by moralizing and exposes the vices of the fast set for the delectation of those who regret that they never had the courage to be quite so fast.

It was the simple faith of the old-fashioned playwright that life proposed no problems not completely solvable by those who were willing in purity of heart "to do the right thing," and it was the dominant thesis of the realistic drama which swept down from the North to revolutionize ethical thought that life's favorite game was, on the contrary, the devising of dilemmas from which neither good-will nor intelligence provided any possible escape. In the play "They Knew What They Wanted," by Sidney Howard three simple people face a problem apparently too difficult for their quite uncultivated intelligences and yet succeed, in a measure, in solving it by virtue of a native intelligence strong enough to make them see how, by giving up much, they can still salvage something from the wreck which circumstance has brought about.

In this age of intellectualized art there is an inevitable but unfortunate tendency to assume of Eugene O'Neill, as of every other arresting artist, that his greatness must lie somehow in the greatness or in the clarity of his thought; to seek in "All God's Chillun" some solution of the problem of race or in the "The Hairy Ape" some attitude toward society; and then, not finding them, to fail in the fullest appreciation of the greatness which is his. It was not thought which drove him, as a young man, to seek adventure among the roughest men he could find, and it was not thought which he brought back from this and other experiments in life.

The article presents discussion on two books. The books are: "Lottery" by the author W. E. Woodward and "The Oblate," By J. K. Huysmans. "The Oblate" is, on the whole, the least interesting of the tetralogy by Huysmans. "Lottery" seems to be the most amusing satire on business. The cause lies not only in the author's evident practical knowledge of commerce, but to an even greater extent in a jolly good humor which enables him to see the fun as well as the meanness in the life Woodward describes.

To even the most capable actors and the most intelligent directors almost everyone is accustomed to give credit for no more than an "interpretation" of the author's work, thus assuming that they cannot, at best, do more than call to the attention those things which, even though latent, the author must have managed somehow to suggest. One forgets that the playwright, unlike the novelist, is directly responsible for only a small part of the sum total of impressions which one receives at any theatrical performance and that for many of them he may not deserve, even indirectly, the credit. It is quite possible for the director, the designer, and the company to take hold of a relatively barren script and surround it with gestures, intonations, and backgrounds sufficiently significant in themselves to transform the work, exactly as a novelist nay transmute, by his style, his descriptions, and his asides, an unimportant narrative into a charming piece of belles lettres. Perhaps it was a desire to prove something of this sort which led the Theater Guild to begin its season with a piece so unimportant in itself as the play "The Guardsman."

Stark Young has a passion for intangible values, and like most mystics he finds in ritual the only possible outlet for those feelings which, though shared by thousands, have never yet been set down in words. Had he been born in some other place and time he might have found contentment in endless repetition of the complicated "offices" of some monastic order, but cast as he has been upon the modern world he cannot be naive enough to accept any one ritual as complete or absolute and it is, accordingly, the idea behind all ritual which fascinates him.

When the curtain rises upon the empty scene of the first act of "Minick" the eye catches in a fraction of a second a perfect vision of the standardized comfort and hackneyed elegance of the middle-class flat. An instant later a sound directs the attention to a distant corner and in an adjoining but just visible room one sees a serving maid, vigorously wiping forks and spoons in that state of vague indignation chronic with those who serve in the slightly disorganized households of the bourgeoisie. With a loud clatter she drops the pieces one by one into the open drawer of a buffet and the atmosphere of nervous irritation which the jangling generates completes the absolute verisimilitude of the picture.

In this article, the author focuses on various theatrical plays and their writers and performers. He first considers the plays "The Best People," by David Gray and performed at the Lyceum Theater and "Grounds for Divorce," by Ernest Vajda and performed at the Empire Theater. Both these plays are excellent entertainments for all its foreign influence and remain as essentially American as the other is essentially European. The author evaluates the works and blend of writing of both the dramatists, Vajda and Avery Hopwood, in a comparative manner.

The theatrical production "Conscience" is very genuine drama of which the beginning gives not the slightest promise. When the curtain rises upon a lonely Alaskan hut swept by paper snow and reveals a very tiresome madman who summons ghosts from behind a black curtain that he may deliver to them vague harangues about the social system in general, the combination of melodramatic nonsense and intellectual pretentiousness suggests nothing so much as a feature film which has unfortunately learned to talk. Hardly less interesting than the problem which the play has wished to present is the problem which it unconsciously raises: How is it possible that a man capable of the telling realism of the two middle acts can burden them with a first scene which seems calculated to drive spectators from the theater and with a fourth which does as much as it can to destroy the effect of what has gone before?

The article presents information several theatrical productions in the U.S. The play "What Price Glory?," performed at Plymouth theater in New York. The play is written by Maxwell Anderson and Lawrence Stallings. According to the author, it is one of the finest play of the war which the U.S. has seen. Audiences are treated to the strange spectacle of a tragedy which is played to the accompaniment of a continual ripple of laughter without once ceasing to be powerful and moving. The terrible impartiality of its verisimilitude, which none of the opposing camps of thought can deny, comes from its authors' realization that whatever their own thoughts may be, what they have seen is more tremendous than their theories.

The book "Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Personality," by Hesketh Pearson is the seventeenth of Pearson's brisk, readable biographies all published within twenty-five years. Scott's career and personality are still interesting and it is upon the career and personality that Pearson concentrates. For a few years Scott was the overwhelmingly most popular poet and for rather more he was the no less overwhelmingly most popular novelist. But one of his many virtues as a man was that far from losing his head, he rather underestimated his importance.

At forty writer Oscar Wilde was the best-known and most successful writer in England. A few years later Wilde's name had become unspeakable. A generation later Wilde's homosexuality might have advanced his reputation. Even today Wilde's reputation is ambiguous and keeps him among those writers who are persistently read and admired while still generally denied the adjective great. Both as a man and as a writer Wilde had virtues which neither time nor scandal nor even his own inferior work has obscured.

This article presents information on the book "The Indomitable Mrs. Trollope," by Eileen Bigland. From the first sentence of this book it is learnt that in late October, 1808, a young lady sat at a writing desk alternately gazing out of the window and nibbling the tip of her quill pen. This is certainly fair and early warning that what the reader is in for is not a biography but a work of fiction composed according to the convention of an omniscient spectator. That method is consistently followed, so that what readers get is approximately one third fact, one third obvious invention, and one third matter which may or may not be based upon some documentary evidence.

This article presents information on the book "Bottle in the Sea," by Albert Guerard. In this book, Guerard gives both the portrait and the history of his mind. And though there are a few of his conclusions with which the author do not happen to agree, there is no point at which the author do not admire the way in which he arrives at them. Unfortunately most people fall into one of two classes; either they have learned nothing from the past or they have learned nothing since. Because Guerard transcends these categories he is wise.

This article presents information on the book "The Diaries of Lewis Carroll," by Roger Lancelyn. These diaries, now admirably edited with full apparatus, have never been published before and were not available to any but the earliest of writer Lewis Carroll's biographers. Except for one gap they cover the years from the time when the diarist took his degree almost to the time of his death, and though they are mostly concerned with the external events of his quiet life they are obviously of prime importance. More than one recent critic has hinted darkly that they were being kept from the public because they would reveal all too plainly the seamy side to the life of a bachelor recluse who spent a lot of his time photographing girl children in the nude and who must therefore have been a cesspool of complexes and inhibitions.

The article discusses books and authors. To most of his contemporaries in Great Britain as well as in the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the greatest thinker and writer New England had produced. That position he still holds in some textbooks, but who outside of college courses, reads him now. Novelist Herman Melville has emerged from obscurity to become the center of a flourishing cult; Nathaniel Hawthorne is far more often discussed by "intellectuals" than he was a generation ago. Certainly, the Spirit of the Age which Emerson hoped to embody has turned against him.

This article briefly discusses the book "Portrait of Andre Gide," by Justin O'Brien. The popularity of Andre Gide is certainly not of the widest possible sort, but among people of consciously literary interests it has grown to imposing proportions. One of the portraits which Mr. O'Brien publishes reveals a kindly and humorous face not in the least embittered of ravaged. Literature must be hurled into an abyss of sensualism from which it will later emerge altogether regenerated. It is true as Mr O'Brien points out that when the dadaists seized on the term acte gratuite as a slogan and made the accomplishment of such an act the most significant human achievement.

The article discusses books and authors. In "Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories," author Bertrand Russell, presents a brief preface which informs us that we readers cannot possibly be more surprised than the author was to find him writing tales, that they are not the result of any long-cherished secret ambition but of a sudden impulse, and that they are intended as pure entertainment. Each of the five which follow is based upon an idea or a fancy rather than upon a character or an observed situation. Each has a certain satiric bite, and, is somewhat ambiguous in its point of view.

Nearly everyone who saw or better yet read the first plays of writer Christopher Fry had the same reaction. There was an astonished delight with his really dazzling gift for words, and there was the hope that he would be able before long to find for that gift some more substantial use. Fry continues to demonstrate that he can exploit better than any other modern what may be called the more purely entertaining possibilities of the neo-metaphysical style. Part of the charm is a youthful exuberance and his own frank astonishment at his copiousness and fluency.

Under the circumstances the author in no position to say how faithful is the dramatization which Anita Loos has made from one of her most popular works, "Gigi." As a guess the author should hazard that Miss Loos has simplified and broadened it considerably. No literary education is, however, required to make the safe prediction that "Gigi" is the first indisputable non-musical hit of the season and that it will be with you for a good long time. A goad deal of the success of the play will be due to the characteristically suave and characteristically chic production which Gilbert Miller has given it.

Self-styled "realists" of both the right and the left sometimes maintain that all "tolerance" is a fraud. No one, they say, really believes in "free speech" except on topics concerning which he is indifferent: if most people believe in the freedom of religion, that merely means that most people don't take religion very seriously. There are always "limits to free speech," and legitimate freedom is always assumed to end where actual concern begins. For Catholics, therefore, it ends this side of "blasphemy"; for the patriot, this side the "attack on our liberties"; for the Jew, this side of "anti-Semitism"; and so on.

This article focuses on Sinclair Lewis, an author. According to the author, Lewis loved notoriety almost as much as he loved fame, and he sought one almost as ardently as the other. What looked like both came to him rather early-he was thirty-five years old in 1920 when his book "Main Street" was published and he had not outlived his reputation when he died at sixty-six. Two years after "Main Street" came the equally sensational "Babbitt"; after that a diminishing series of novels which, nevertheless, included such successful books as "Arrowsmith," "Elmer Gantry," "Dodsworth," and "It Can't Happen Here."