request, he will not divorce her be¬
cause the publicity of the scandal
would ruin the career of her lover, a
poor young medical man. He will al¬
low her to live with him quietly and
unsuspected in a new environment.
The rectory, in the person of its mis¬
tress, demands, in the name of Church
and morality—and of the manor house
—that he apply for a divorce; the vil¬
lagers, assembled at the local pub.,
opine that he should bash in the other
man's face, and see to it, by the meth¬
ods applied by them in such cases, tha
his wife shall thereafter love him
faithfully. And they agree with their
betters that the only alternative is di¬
vorce. So they treat him to a hissing
and booing serenade at the end of
evening service. The curate, driven to
the end of his power of endurance, is
accidentally preserved from suicide,
finding companionship and solace in a
sorrowing widower, just bereaved.
This curate, then, is an embodiment
of an ideal, rather then a man. The
ideal must be left tothe judgment of
the reader or spectator, but the qual¬
ity of theman, fails to win our sym¬
menn
S n
pooksk.
K
S#
eetun
Novelette by
Kate Douglas
Wiggin, a very
pretty love story
and 6 of the Best
Short Stories of
the year
inthe August
Fiction Number of
a1 6
Seriefiere
A Story of the Sea and
Shore, By J. B. Connolly.
=A Story of Pirate Gold,
by Jennette Lee.—A Story
ofthe Woods, by George
T. Marsh.—A Prose Play
about a great artist. by
Stephen Phillips.—Afun¬
ny Darky Story, by Una
Hunt.—A Story of Come¬
dy and Pathos. by Gordon
A. Smith.
Beautiful Illustrations
OalI Newestande
By the author of
Daddy-Long-Legs
DEAR
Eramt
A Far irom Sad Love Story
By JEAN WEBSTER
#vit begins in the August
eeeen
terror and of unseen horrors yet to
come, but with far less effect; and he
tails utterly in suggesting the grandeur
of the young King of Belgium, who is
the true hero of this war. Surely, in
drama at least, he should be more than
the modest young man who, in this
play, visits incognito his country's
greatest poet, wounded in its defence.
The chief characters are, indeed, of
little interest. The mother alone, among
them, strikes the tragic note in her
approsching madness. That note is re¬
peated more strongly in the demented
peasant girl ceaselessly asking the way
back to her village which exists no
more; and it sounds most ominously—
in the Maeterlinckian manner again—in
the rising of the waters after the
dikes have been cut, and in the distant
roar of the voices of the drowning
Germans—an echo, perhaps, of the
horror of the Maaurian lakes. An¬
dreyev, however geod his intention,
might well have left the writing of the
drama of the sorrows of Belgium to a
Belgian pen.
The translator furnishes a brief
preface, in which he assures us that
the Russian writer has written “an¬
other masterpiece' in which he de¬
nounces the sufferings of the Russian
Jews in the war.
Mr. Björkman's selection oflthe three
Schnitzler play# is unezceptionable.
hor's
They present to the full
68•
attitude toward life,
11
sence of thé Weltanse.
Vienng, intunge in ite
the flbeting heur, yet al
he
undercurrent of melanch
ely
city's famaus waltzes. In“T
Way,“ indeed, the hour for seriousness
has struck, the time has come for all
its characters to begin to think of the#
bill that must be paid. They are ap¬
proaching the “youth of old age,“
verging on fifty—the woman whose in¬
discretion lies twenty years behind
her; the man she has loved, his friend
and confidant—both of them butterflies
who have gayly spent their summer
and now face the autumnal road of
loneliness. But the husband, ignorant
of the deception played upon him.
lauding the wisdom of his own course
in life, pinning his faith to the do¬
mestic ties he has formed, is yet to
learn that for him, too, old age will be
the lonely way. For his wife dies. and.
his children leave him. According to
Herr Schnitzler, there are no compen¬
sations, no consolations for the pass-1
ing of the heyday of living. And, final-
ly, there is the family physician, whom
the Viennese dramatist so often selectsIV
play the part of the younger
Dumas’s rdisonneur, the philosopher
and commentator of the piece.
In The Lonely Way, then, Schnitz¬
ler gives us Vienna in its mood of mel¬
ancholy, the joys of life which it wor¬
ships left behind it on the road. And
in it he gives us his own measure as a
serious dramatist. He carries us wich
him while in the theatre. while we are
reading, but the moment the curtain
has fallen, the last page has been
turned, we begin to doubt. Hefe, more
even than in his lighter mood, he is
of the city on the Donau rather than
of the world at large. Whatever the
significance of this play for his own
people, whom he knows so well, to us
at a distance, in a far different at¬
mosphere. it makes him appear as a
clever man of the theatre rather than
as a member of the band of dramatists
whose meaning and message are inter¬
national.
UIntermezzo,“ Mr. Björkman holds,
proves him to be a feminist and “one
of the foremost living painters of wom¬
an's soul.“ Perhaps. Butit 1s, first of
all, a clever a#
naughty comedy of an
opera sing
ndue¬
tor hush
W
ways
Mes
only
Schnitsler intoeen¬
("The Lonelz War
eic. Antehe
Kennerley.)
—
pied with Viennese triangles and the
ingenious patterns he can compose with
them. The subject long ago began to
pall unon us, as it has palled unon
the French. But certain it is that a
reading of these three plays will suf¬
fice to give the student of the contem¬
porary drama a thorough understand- a
ing of the work of Austria's best-so
known and cleverest playwright.
—t
S

450
WA N



ch