"They don't do their duty by the drains a telling sentence. An American letter would have been less humorous, but more vivid.

Grand Duke as Dramatist ERNST LUDWIG, ex-Grand Duke of Hesse, has emerged from his retirement in a new and noteworthy rôle. Under the pseudonym E. K. Ludhard he has published a Mystery in Dramatic Form, which has been accepted for performance at the German playhouse at Hamburg. The work is of a strongly religious character, and offers consolation to those bereaved by the war. Its central figure is Christ, who appears under the name of 'Mediator,' to bring comfort to a family who have lost son and brother in battle. His message is that 'for the eye of the soul' there is no death, and that faith can give absolute certainty of continuous community with the departed. In the climax of the piece a dead man appears to lift the black veil from his mother's shoulders, and she 'spreads out her arms as if relieved from a burden.'

For many years past the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig has been known as an eager encourager of art. His open-mindedness on this subject was not always very happy in its results, for under his encouragement there grew up in Darmstadt a residential quarter in which some of the houses looked as if they had been turned upside down.

A Christmas Book for the Blind

OUT of a mass of books that come from the publishers at this season is one that attracts attention to itself by its form. The big page plates excite curiosity. Such an illustrated book has never been seen before. It is A Picture Book for the Blind. The title tells its main purpose, but its appeal goes out to the sighted as well. How can it fail

there? It is the only picture book of its kind in the world, designed for those whose fingers are their eyes. The National Institute for the Blind, 224-6–8, Great Portland Street, W. 1, is responsible for the enterprise.

A Cry from the Gallery

THE recent revival of Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle was so successful that voices from the gallery were heard bawling, 'Author! Author!' Let us hope that Francis

Beaumont Gent. and his collaborator heard the call at their seats in the Inn of Paradise.

Another Language Question

A DISTINGUISHED London clergyman has two maids both named Kate. One is a Cockney, the other a Scot. The difficulty of distinguishing the two is solved by the easy method of calling one Kite and the other Kate. No confusion ever arises.

The Robbery at Lake Como

THE Chronicle tells of the theft of the famous Byzantine silver cross and other ecclesiastical treasures kept at Gravedona on Lake Como, which the thieves broke into small pieces and sold for melting down:

Extraordinary psychological imbecility is revealed in the fact that although the cross alone is valued at 1,000,000 francs (over £40,000), the wretched perpetrators of this sacrilege turned over the entire collection to the silversmith for 510 francs (£21), and so realized £7 apiece for their pains.

It reads singularly like a parable of the dealings of the Bolsheviki with Russian civilization.

A New Book by Mr. Balfour

A NEW book by Mr. Balfour is a distinct event in the literary world and Essays, Speculative and Historical, which Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton have just published at 12s. 6d. net,

breaks a five years' silence. These silences are not uncommon with Mr. Balfour, for after his first book, A Defense of Philosophic Doubt, which made its appearance forty-one years ago, fourteen years intervened before he gave to the world Essays and Addresses in 1893, followed by Foundations of Belief in 1895. Another eight years passed and then came Economic Notes on Insular Trade, after which his publications became fairly regular until 1906, when there was another break of nine years.

The present volume is a collection of essays, lectures, and occasional papers written during the last twelve years, divided into two groups, 'Speculative' and 'Political.' The latter deal chiefly with Germany, and range in date from 1912 to 1918, including the British reply to President Wilson's request for a statement of the objects of the Entente Powers in the war.

Down with the Classics!

A LETTER from Sir Harry Johnston to the editor of the New Statesman:

SIR: Absence in the North of England, where the New Statesman is slow in penetrating, prevented my seeing 'Affable Hawk's' article, which contained an unusually vivid exposure of the nineteenth-century youth's waste of time over the classics. I therefore only read it to-day, concurrently with the protests it has aroused among the surviving champions of the classics.

To persons like myself, 'Affable Hawk's' article was a case of converting the converters or the long-converted. We could not help regarding it as a biologist or geologist of 1920 must have estimated the realization of evolution or the rejection of the incrusted Babylonian myths in religion by Canon Barnes very creditable and heartening, but very belated.

But the protests are exasperating, for the protesters reproduce argu

ments as stale or as false as those used by the plumage traders in their defense of an iniquitous trade. They cannot see the disproportionate value to-day of 'classical' studies weighed against the thousand other studies which have come under our consideration since 1820. They do not realize that the tiny modicum of historical, ethnological, or ethical value in the Greek and Latin classics could be taught in about six out of the annual 1,680 hours a year devoted to education. A few specialists in comparative literature, in ancient history or prehistory, in numismatics, philology, the growth of religious ideas, and the origin of laws, arts, and sciences might go deeper into Greek and Latin prose and poetry. But the utility of such studies to most persons in the twentieth century is very small.

It is because the dons and schoolmasters have learned alas! nothing else, that they still plead for the privilege of wasting young people's time and brains over these early efforts of Mediterranean man to philosophize on very little data, on these very dreary comedies with their Neolithic humor, these unreal tragedies, these concocted histories, this turgid poetry with its stale tropes and inapposite similes.

If there are beautiful thoughts, sudden perceptions of undying truths, original apothegms and genuine wit in Latin and Greek, are there not sentences equally pregnant of value in the Ila language of South Central Africa as translated by the Reverend Edwin Smith in his just issued book? The Smithsonian Institute has published during the last ten years a series of ethnological studies of North Amerindian languages in which appear translations of Red Indian songs, stories, and discourses that contain a philosophy as noteworthy in expression, in penetration, and glimpse of basic truth as anything to be found in the supposi

titious dialogues of Plato. Almost the only book in classical Latin which is of real enchaining, human interest is the Golden Ass of Apuleius. And that is mainly read for its obscenity.

The structure of classical Latin is so astonishingly perverse in its dislocation of the natural order of words in a sentence that were it not for the inscriptions left by unliterary soldiers one might almost imagine it a 'literary' tongue, devised so as not to be understood by the vulgar. It is thus impossible as a universal language. And when attempts were made in the Middle Ages by clerics and lay lawyers to write it in a reasonable manner the resultant tongue was styled 'Low Latin.' Nevertheless, some knowledge of its vocabulary-especially of Monkish Latin is useful for those who are seeking to acquire a sound knowledge of the modern romance tongues. And Romaic Modern Greek is one of the important languages of the Mediterranean and Near East. On those grounds, and on no others, these languages should be learned. As to the literature locked up in classical Latin and Greek, translations fortunately pullulate of all the more important authors. These translations were the only atonement made for their wasted lives by scores of masters of colleges, Bishops of the Church of England, headmasters of public schools, or Victorian statesmen. From such translations there can be rapidly conveyed to those curious as to the Mediterranean element in our culture a comprehensive and fairly accurate idea of the vapid, diffuse, confused, reiterated, ill-founded philosophies, sentiments,

ideals, records, and aspirations of the Greeks and Romans who lived between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 500.

But those last defenders of the classics whom we allow to linger on the stage should not anger and provoke the modernists by speaking of their favorite studies as 'the humanities,' or advance them as an antidote to materialism. The 'humanities' in education comprise everything that bears directly on the body and mind of the human species, and should commence with the inculcation of anthropology. An ignorance of anthropology lies at the back of all the maladministration of the British Empire, in Ireland as in East Africa, in Asia as in Tropical America; and it is the main cause of international discord. Yours, etc.,

H. H. JOHNSTON.

And a Story 'Pour en Finir'

He was from Scotland, and was making his first visit to London. Being a true-blooded Scot, he was very slow to acknowledge that London had anything in the way of buildings or parks to beat Edinburgh. But after seeing the Cenotaph he began to waver, though he still hesitated, seeking for a way out. The climax came with dramatic suddenness when his host took him along the embankment near Waterloo Bridge after nightfall. Across the river he caught sight of Dewar's bonnie Scotchman illuminated from head to toe, whose smile came beaming over the dark, gliding water. 'Mon,' he cried, 'that beats all. There's nathin' in Scotland like that. I'll give in.'

A GOOD play has the effect of making me feel (a) that it must have been very easy to write, and (b) that I shall immediately write one as good as, if not better than, it is. A bad play makes me feel that only by the most extraordinary mental and physical exertions could it have been written, and I leave the theatre in which it is performed horribly depressed and absolutely resolved that, rather than undergo this frightful labor I will keep a diary, or write my Mis-Memoirs, or name myself 'The Gentleman with the Knuckle-Duster,' and listen unctuously at keyholes! . . .

Mr. George Moore, who is, perhaps, the most considerable artist now writing in English-I am not unmindful of Mr. Conrad when I say that once asked me whether I proposed to devote myself to the writing of novels or of plays. My pleasure at being noticed at all by Mr. Moorea mountain nodding to a molehill was so great that I became swollen with vanity, and I answered, with careless arrogance, 'Oh, I shall do both!' He retorted that this was not possible. He had tried to write novels and plays, and who was I that I should imagine I could do what he had not done? This ought to have settled the matter for me, but I have told you that I was swollen with vanity so I waved my hand airily to Mr. Moore and said, 'Nevertheless, I shall do both!' and then I walked away so that he could not have a chance of saying anything more to me. But sometimes in those awful hours of the night,

when one has counted nine thousand and ninety-five sheep jumping through a gap in a hedge and is still wide awake, I have wondered whether it is possible to express one's self in both forms with equal skill.

Fielding tried his hand at writing plays, but soon abandoned the drama for the novel. I am not entirely convinced that he did so because of the oppressions of the Censor. I do not believe that the Censorship has prevented a genuine dramatist from producing plays, although it has undoubtedly hampered him in his work. Mr. Shaw, who wrote five novels before he wrote one play, did not return to the writing of novels when Mrs. Warren's Profession was banned. He has had three plays banned - I succeeded in getting the Censor to remove the ban on one of them- but he has not ceased to write plays on that account. Dr. Johnson turned away from drama because he discovered that he could compile dictionaries better than he could compose tragedies. Mr. Conrad and Mr. Henry James tried to write. plays, but with as little success as R. L. Stevenson had with Admiral Guinea. Mr. George Moore's plays are nowhere near the level of his novels. The whole of Mr. W. B. Yeats's plays count for less than one of his lyrics. Mr. Arnold Bennett has written many successful plays, but none of them approaches in stature that great book, The Old Wives' Tale. Mr. Alan Monkhouse's comedies are, I think, better than his novels. Sir James Barrie wrote novels before he

wrote plays, and they were very fine novels, too, but he seems to have convinced himself that he could not write novels and plays, for he abandoned the first form when he accepted the second. Mr. Galsworthy, more successfully than anyone else, combines the office of the novelist with that of the dramatist, but I have observed that when he produces a good play it is nearly always succeeded by a poor novel, and when he produces a good novel, it is nearly always succeeded by a poor play.

All this speculation causes me to feel sometimes that, when I answered Mr. Moore with careless arrogance, I was behaving with more than customary silliness. I like to think that I am the unique creature who will successfully combine the functions of the novelist and the dramatist, but horrid doubts grow in my mind that perhaps on the Last Day the Recording Angel will say of me, 'This poor devil tried to write plays and novels, but only succeeded in doing some articles for the Observer!' The position is complicated for me by the fact that I really began to write novels, not out of any spiritual urgency, but in order to earn money during the years when people were staying away from my plays in their thousands. Now I have contracted the habit and cannot easily get rid of it. I suggest, therefore, to aspiring dramatists that they will do well to keep the two forms quite separate, that they should not attempt to combine them unless they have very peculiar and special qualities, and that even then they should realize that they cannot hope to be equally good in using both forms.

Having carried my speculations that far, I began to consider a point that has sometimes been put to me, on how one is to learn to write plays. I find that people who do not write books or plays always put two questions to me. How

do I do it? and, How much do I get for it? The answer in each case is nearly always in the negative. Last March I talked to a group of young dramatists in New York about the technique of stage plays, and I discovered that all of them started off to write plays by reading Mr. William Archer's book, PlayMaking. It occupied in their minds much the same position that is occupied by the Bible in the mind of a Christian Endeavorer. Now, PlayMaking is as good a book on this subject as is ever likely to be written, but its instruction is necessarily of a negative character, and one might as well try to build a world after reading the book of Genesis as try to make a play after reading the book of Mr. Archer. We can all say, 'Let there be Light!' but how many of us can guarantee that Light will ensue? I commend Mr. Archer's book to aspiring dramatists, but the help they can derive from it is strictly limited and entirely negative.

When I write a play, I do not think of a theatre at all. To this day, although I have had control of one, I am almost completely ignorant of the technical business of the stage, and when people ask me questions about 'battens' and 'limes' and 'flies,' I have to ask them what these things are. I never can remember which is the O.P. side of the stage without doing a sort of sum in mental arithmetic. There is no reason why a dramatist should know about them any more than there is a reason why a novelist should know about the processes of printing. All that he need know is enough to prevent him from asking stage managers to do impossible things. His common sense ought to tell him that it is ridiculous to make an actor go off the stage in a lounge suit and return to it in ten or twenty seconds dressed in evening clothes! He ought not to divide an act into three scenes, each of which occu