the audience with him when he exposes the folly of our present attitude toward a man who, like the hero, has, by his discoveries, "saved more human lives in a year than were lost in the whole Spanish War."

In another comedy, Das Konzert, the Austrian playwright, Heinrich Bahr, has given us a delightful study of the modern man of science. Dr. Jura, the brilliant young naturalist, has risen from the ranks by force of talent and industry, and is full of the most modern theories of life as well as of science. Through his marriage with a pretty young heiress he finds himself suddenly a rich man and a member of the upper middle class, but without any of the inherited traditions and conventions which determine the thoughts and actions of his new associates. The way in which he meets each new situation and tries to solve each new problem which life brings by the light of pure reason, of natural feeling and of common sense, and the effect on the other characters of his failure to show the expected reactions, is one of the most delightful features of this comedy.

To speak of the hero of a Russian drama would almost always be a misnomer, but in Andreieff's play To the Stars the astronomer Sergius Ternovsky easily occupies the first place. It is a noble if somewhat vague and romantic picture of the man of science as the high priest in the great service of trying to harmonize man with the universe in which he must dwell and which he finds it so impossible to understand. It is in no sense a popular play, but a tribute to the power of science, and to the belief that it can lift man above the sorrows and disappointments of his own life into the realm of the eternal.

Even the archæologist has not escaped the call of the stage, but has been cast by d'Annunzio for the rôle of hero in "that most perturbing of modern dramas," La Città Morta. The scene is set on the hot and thirsty plain of Argos, where the young Hellenist Leonardo is seeking the tombs of the ancient kings of Mycena. When they are at last found, after days and weeks of unceasing labour and of tense excitement, something of the wild and unnatural passions which rent the breasts of the descendants of Tantalus seems to pass over into those of their modern discoverers. All the relationships of the

four noble and beautiful people who have gathered there for the work are altered; natural affection changes to wild passion which brings despair and death in its train. It is a strange and terrible story, but full of power and beauty, told in magical prose and set in an atmosphere so vivid that no one who has seen or read the play can ever forget it. It may be decadent and unhealthy; one would say that its motives and passions are as foreign as possible to our materialistic age. Yet for months in Paris crowded houses sat in tense emotion while these four souls worked out their destiny under the shadow of the accursed house of Atreus.

Other plays of like subject might be added to those already discussed, but enough have been given to sustain the contention that the modern world is interested in the man of science and the scholar, that it is ready to enter into his joys and sorrows, his aspirations and ambitions, that it respects and honors his calling and appreciates his value to the community. Certainly no one has a right to stigmatize our age as grossly materialistic, interested only in practical affairs and in men of action, unless he can prove to us that some other has accorded to its men of learning a superior, or at least, an equal place in the mimic world of the stage. MARIAN P. WHITNEY.

THE MOTHER OF THE VIOLINIST LISTENS

BY LEONORA SPEYER

She knows that fleet victory of fingers,

And every flight of the Mercury-winged bow;

She does not play herself,

She is not a musician, no,

But is he not her son?

She knows those fingers,

Laughed as they fumbled at the toy fiddle brought to him, her baby,

On Chanuka,

Marveling a little even then;

Knew them at her breast

And before that,

In the warm shadows where they first stirred.

O world of tuneful purpose since then,

Persistent, patient,

O conquered world where he, aloof and lifted,

As on a hill,

Stands with his violin against his face,

Child's face, and boy's, and man's:

O comfortable, lovely world.

She sits alone,

Serene as Buddha in the great building.
So she sat in the Crimean market-place
Among her chickens and red cabbages,
Haggling a little,

Counting her kopeks stolidly.

She knows those fingers!

And yet

There is such sweetness in that bright, edged sound

Cutting into our hearts,

Imperious clamor of four strings rising above the surf of orchestra,
Quivering like heat in the air.

She pushes from her plump shoulders the fur he gave her,

Your mother listens and her body breaks with birth again;

O aching, silver trumpets,

O screaming larks!

A-a-a-h

A thousand hands strike together,

The sound is arid,

Flat as a sandy road,

In any key.

She smiles:

The English coat looks fine;

And easy to play in, he says.

One concert more,

One concerto more;

He still likes Brahms' the best.

"Tchudno!" a voice bawls from a far, slanting bank of faces;

CATHEDRAL

BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

Perpendiculars

Stemmed upward, blossoming,

Bend over from a sky of stone.

Stars,

Stars larger than the moon in heaven, swing

Circles of blue and crimson through the blown And frozen branches of a granite tree.

A slanting rope

Of light unravels fraying into dark:

As of a bee

Mumbles across the gloom and echoes grope

After it following. A sullen spark

Rings from reluctant bronze and smouldering Flares up and falls.

Silent, an imminence of walls

Leans on the world with overreaching wing.