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A Night at the Theatre

NE thing you may be sure of always in a Shaw play-none of the characters alters his point of view in the slightest; no, not if there are five acts, and any number of prologues and epilogues. In fact, you may be certain that Shavian characters will meet all the situations which their creator thinks up for them-with their original complexes completely unabridged and their prejudices totally unaffected by any of the events of their theatric lives.

What, you complain, they do not learn by experience? No, they do not. They may be sadder or wiser; they may compromise with their situations in the end. But underneath they end as they began. Dubedat, Marchbanks, Joan of Arc, Candida-call the roll.

It is Mr. Shaw's view of human nature; and it is unquestionably a reasonable one.

Naturally, it results in complaints from Mr. Shaw's critics that the Irish dramatist is always superior to his puppets, that his creations are brilliant but confusing, and that as a direct result his plays lack humanity, whatever of beauty or poetry, or drama and wit they may possess. Said William Archer, years ago: "He must always be superior to every character, every motion, every situation he portrays."

Well, similar complaints and gestures of dismissal-after an evening of magnificently blended wit, buffoonery, and truth-may be heard any night at the Guild Theatre just now, as the excellently attired and socially presentable crowd streams out from the Guild's revival of "The Doctor's Dilemma."

You probably remember dimly what the dilemma is. Shall Dr. Ridgeon, able to save only one man of two, save à greatly gifted but scoundrelly painterwith whose wife he is in love—or a poor, unsuccessful general practitioner who is his friend and a highly moral man, but of not much value? The answer is that the doctor turns the painter over to a group of specialists, all of whom are quacks and each one of whom does battle for his particular "fad." The charlatan of the crowd finally treats the patient and kills him; whereupon the painter, Louis Dubedat, dies most beautifully and the wife considers that Dr.

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"Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. Done with vim, rum, and pistols.

"The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history, providing an amusing evening.

"The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck.Vaudeville and melodrama, with vaudeville taking the tricks. "Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor. "Escape," Booth.-Strung on a thin thread, but the most satisfying play on Broadway. "Porgy," Republic.-A folk-play of South Carolina Negro life along the Charleston water-front. "The Good Hope," Civic Repertory Theatre.-A slow tragedy of the men who comb the sea for fish and the women they leave behind. "Trial of Mary Dugan," National.-Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial.

"An Enemy of the People," Hampden's Theatre.It's bitter; but it's Ibsen-and true. "Coquette," Maxine Elliott.-A tragedy of youth and small-town life in the South. "The Ivory Door," Charles Hopkins Theatre.A whimsical presentation of the truth about human nature with a mediæval court for its setting.

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truthful writing with uproarious burlesque and buffoonery. For "The Doctor's Dilemma" is exceedingly amusing. It has lost none of its qualities with the years. Perhaps Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington is too patently a burlesque of a doctor to carry conviction. Perhaps you realize that the death of Louis Dubedat is an impudent attempt by Mr. Shaw to induce you through most moving words put into the mouth of a man whom you consider is purely a Scoundrel-to shed tears which will prove you as unreasoning a person as any of the physicians on the stage. Perhaps the scene where each doctor in succession finds that the poor artist whom they have decided to help to health has gulled them all into lending him money

under false pretenses-perhaps this scene is too mechanical. But the unmatchable entertainment remains-perception turned jester, playing now the buffoon, now the sage with his tongue in his cheek.

Besides its propaganda against the infallibility of doctors, the play has at least one real theme. For the trouble is, that to Louis Dubedat, the artistic villain, his own truth and necessities, and therefore his philosophy, are precisely as convincing and moral for him as the doctors' are to them, although Dubedat, by ordinary standards, is manifestly a scoundrel. No matter how much the doctors try, therefore, they cannot argue away the fact that morality and ethics are different things to different people, as well as to different races and to different ages. Dubedat's truth is his own idea of God-and thus his religion and his faith. This faith he defends with his intellect. Is he, then, twisted? Well, in the sense that he does not resemble the rest of us, at this moment. But lofty moral judgment of Louis Dubedat is difficult. Wherefore the contradictions and endless arguments in the play.

Of course, as ever, the majority dis misses Mr. Shaw as a man who is merely devilishly amusing, and therefore not to be taken seriously. But presumably this is because the majority does not understand him. It does not remember that to understand Shaw is not to see eye to eye with him. In fact, genuinely to understand him is to realize at once, as a corollary, that by no possible chance can complete agreement be possible. For the higher the truth a man sees, the more of apparent contradictions it must envisage. Each man who climbs, climbs his own mountain-top, and the view dif fers according to the height and the particular peak. In the case of Shaw his mountain-top is extremely high, and his wit in describing the view is most unusual. Which increases the number of contradictions he sees and presents.

Take a very simple example. It is becoming a commonplace that in certan natures what is ordinarily considered commendable Christian sacrifice may reality be nothing more or less than (Continued on page 534)

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A

Windows on the World

CHANCE to talk things over is often the best way of avoiding a fight. But when the aggrieved parties are nations, it is difficult to arrange. And when the nations concerned are Great Powers, it is almost impossible, for their dignity will not allow them to admit that there is anything to talk over. That is the situation between France and Italy, and all Europe has been watching them anxiously.

A whole series of issues have set them at odds-French treaties with Yugoslavia balanced against Italian treaties with Albania; alleged Fascist ambitions to recover from France some of the formerly Italian Riviera coast; alleged French interest in or at least indifference to anti-Fascoist plots on French territory; rival colonial interests in North Africa.

To get Briand, the veteran French Foreign Minister, and Mussolini, the Fascist dictator, together to talk out their differences, Locarno fashion, is one of the main aims of European diplomacy. Briand has indicated his desire to meet Mussolini, who in turn has voiced his readiness, with reservations, to meet Briand-after the Foreign Offices at Paris and Rome have come to terms.

Just here I note that the League of Nations has again acted adroitly as an agency for peace in Europe. Having ended the Lithuanian-Polish deadlock at Geneva, it has decided to hold the next meeting of the League Council in Rome. That will give the two statesmen an opportunity in March to meet and talk without making of it a too official event. And until then, it may be forecast, there will be no serious trouble between France and Italy.

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By MALCOLM WATERS DAVIS

régimé, has been excluded from membership in the Naples bar. The official purgers of the Neapolitan legal profession decided that he had "acted against the interests of the country while abroad." He has spoken openly in England and France against Fascism and has asserted that Mussolini's national policy is aggressive and a peril to peace. His exclusion from the bar is Fascism's characteristic answer to open criticism.

SE

ENATOR BORAH has introduced anew his resolution for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Government of Russia. Evidently the courts already recognize it, for the Supreme Court has allowed to stand a decision by a lower court that "the State of Russia" has a right to maintain a suit in the United States. The issue arose in a case growing out of the Black Tom explosion in New Jersey during the World War. The question concerned damages for war materials which had been ordered for Russia.

With Russia's opportunity to secure her legal rights in American courts assured by the highest authority, the proposal of recognition resolves itself into the question whether enough is to be gained from it to be worth the disturbance of Bolshevik diplomacy at Washington.

The Communist Party Congress in Moscow has meanwhile decided to instruct the Communist International organization to beware of America and American industrial tendencies. Bukharin, President of the International and

intellectual prophet of Bolshevism, de

nounced American workmen as "the aristocracy of labor," whose high wages apparently made them insensible to the appeal of class struggle. So perhaps the Soviet Government might recoil from the

danger of infection by actual contact with prosperity in the United States.

Certain of these American aristocrats of labor, however, returning on the Berengaria from a union tour of Russia, indicated a preference for the Soviet land, where labor has more power, better hours of work, control of job conditions, and provision for education, accidents, unemployment, and old age. And some women members of the American Investigating Committee on Russian Women, returning on the same ship, declared that Soviet Russia has raised her women to a level in some respects higher than that enjoyed by women anywhere else in the world.

"It is painful to patriotic Americans," their statement said, "to recognize how far their country lags behind Soviet Russia in its treatment of women."

It may seem flippant treatment of a sober matter, but I must confess the relief of at least one reader at news-for a change of a place where women are supposed to be more favored than in America.

OMEN in France are appar

Wo

ently to have their chance once more for suffrage-assuming that they want it, which any one who knows France may be permitted to doubt. By a vote of the Ministerial Council, the latest equal suffrage proposal is to go before the Senate, which has repeatedly voted down such measures after passage by the Chamber of Deputies. This bill would give women both the vote and eligibility to hold office.

LINDBERGH, after having taken Mex

ico by storm as he took Europe, is to fly on to Central America, and then to Cuba. The whole plan, Mexico included so the Washington "Star" now asserts-was his own idea, formed be

fore President Calles sent him an invitation from Mexico City. He proposes to visit Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, and then hop across to Havana for the meeting of the Pan-American Congress.

Encouragement of air commerce between the United States and the Latin republics to the south is avowedly his main aim. And important as his conquest of Mexican good will has been, this purpose of promoting air traffic may well prove to have more fundamental significance. An air-mail route is being discussed, and other projects should follow. Two French fliers who crossed the Atlantic to South America are now touring that continent, and plans for an airmail service from Europe are under way. The United States, with a land route to follow, hardly need let Europe be first in this field as Lindbergh is showing.

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F the Kaiser had occupied London with the Prussian army, says G. K. Chesterton, the English essayist, he could not have altered English life more thoroughly than American economic pressure is doing. He sees English existence being transformed, and does not like it. What he evidently fails to take into account, in his protest against "the Americanization of England," is that the process is not exclusively or consciously American. It is a secondary effect of the machine age, which happened to develop faster in America than anywhere else.

A Night at the Theatre

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negative form of securing ego at other people's expense-that is, when the people sacrificed for do not wish the sacrifice made and are only rendered unhappy by it. In some cases this desire to sacrifice goes as far as to produce "martyrs" of the family circle. We all know them.

The point is that self-sacrifice can be both moral and unmoral, depending upon, let us say, the straightness and honesty, emotional and intellectual, of the person involved.

With this in mind, let a playwright who has sufficient ability draw a character who thinks he or she is self-sacrificing and generous, but who only succeeds in reality in playing the part of the vil

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it had been, Norris was still the consis- art of blatherskiting to the bleachers, I tent opponent of its policies.

Norris has been the most consistent of all recalcitrants. He has committed political suicide more frequently than any other man in Congress, and the price of the poison has never been too high for him to pay. And yet he remains not merely a Senator but a Republican Senator in good standing, Chairman of the powerful Committee on Judiciary. Leader, since the death of the elder La Follette, of the radicals, he is classed in the popular mind rather with Borah than with Brookhart.

Earnest, active, eager, a practical idealist, Norris remains, in spirit at least, what he was when he came to Congress twenty-four years ago. The extraordinarily large dark eyes which are Isaid to have made him the idol of the girls at Valparaiso gave him, as age came on, a sort of owlish appearance which may, in part, account for his having in popular esteem a larger dignity than ordinarily is accorded a radical.

IN

N the Congressional Directory the first name in the biographies of United States Senators is that of James Thomas Heflin, of Alabama.

I first saw this man on the platform of the old Seven Hills Chautauqua at Owensboro, Kentucky, twenty-five years ago. Heflin's was then a handsome, an impressive presence.

When I had listened to him for a while, I thought, "If the man had a playwright to fix his lines, what an actor he would make!"

I cannot get over that regret. Heflin missed his calling. Irvin Cobb and Augustus Thomas are accounted artistic story-tellers. Either of them, in a twohorse race with Heflin, would run second. He ought to have been an actor.

Still, given though he is today to the

believe that posterity will discover in Tom Heflin something of the statesman. If you are to prove him a numskull, you must ignore his early record in Congress when, though not positively big, he stood above the average of Congressmen,

What is the matter with him now? I asked that question, the other week, of one of his friends in Alabama. He replied, "Oh, Tom's crazy." He did not mean to say-nor do I mean to infer by quoting him that Heflin is insane. "Crazy" is a wide word in our vernacular. It merely meant in this case that "Tom's queer," which leaves the question as far from an answer as before.

But there he stands not all of the time, but most of the time, it seemswell back on the Democratic side, in Prince Albert coat and white waistcoat, vehement, red-faced, bellowing, hurling himself into this cause and that, but always, so it seems, overly anxious to do the bidding of the Ku Klux Klan, fevered and flustered, the patron saint of the Public Printer.

An old correspondent who has been here for forty-five years says that he thinks there has been one Senator in that time, Call, of Florida, who made as many speeches as Heflin-but he did not make them as long.

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T

Financial Department

Conducted by WILLIAM Leavitt Stoddard

HE idea is

Super-Investment

prevalent in THIS department will furnish in

formation regarding standard investment securities, but cannot undertake to advise the purchase of any specific security. It will give to inquirers facts of record or information resulting from expert investigation, and a nominal charge of one dollar per inquiry will be made for this service. Not more than five issues of stocks or bonds can be discussed in reply to any one inquirer. All letters should be addressed to The Outlook Financial Department.

many quarters that the creation of a trust under a will or otherwise is something that is open to the wealthy alone. However, with the greater fund of information that is coming to the public largely as the result of the advertising campaigns of trust companies and National banks, this idea is gradually being driven out. People of moderate and small means are more and more coming to the realization that the trust, both as a form of protecting their property after death and as a means of directing its use, is something that is well worth their practical consideration.

Theoretically, a trust can be very small. It is not a very common thing for an income as low as a hundred dollars a year to be paid out by a trust, but the writer is familiar with a will one clause of which established a trust with that annual disbursement for the life of the beneficiary. On the other end of the scale, trusts may pay out tens of thousands of dollars of income. The only practical limit is the size of the fund which it is proposed to place in trust.

What does it cost to have a trust? The usual cost is a percentage of income, usually five or six per cent. Trust companies have the practice in many States of making a minimum fee, often $30 or $50 a year, no matter what the total of the trust. Hence trusts with a yearly revenue of two or three hundred dollars are discouraged. In the case of the trust mentioned above, this was one of several under a will, and the trustee's fee was based on the total revenue of all the trusts, so that the minimum fee was not deducted from the hundred-dollar income.

What can a trust do?

This question brings us to the heart of he whole trust problem. A short anwer to this question is that a trust can, within reason, do just exactly what its naker intends it to do. No trust, of course, can run forever, except those stablished for charitable purposes. No rust moneys can be paid out for illegal

objects. The pur

pose of a trust is to maintain a certain principal sum of money in conservative investments and pay out the income to specific persons, finally distributing the principal to individuals or institutions.

To illustrate by a fairly common example:

A man leaves his property, which we may suppose will amount to $80,000 in all, in trust. If he has a wife and children, and if he makes the trust-as he should do before his family is grown, educated, and "on the world," he will probably provide that the income be paid to his widow as long as she lives or till she remarries, if she does. If such an event occurs, the will may well provide that she receive a portion and that the rest go to the support of the children. This contingency aside, the will covers the contingency of the death of the widow before the children are selfsupporting. It provides in a typical case for the education of the children and for the payment of an income to them till, perhaps, the age of thirty years. Often in the case of daughters it is provided that the income shall continue through life, while the sons may receive their share at a stated age.

This trust, then, does several important things. In the first place, it prevents the possible dissipation of principal which might occur were the principal of the estate to go to the widow without the legal protection of a trust. The story of the "small fortune" left to a widow untrained in business and preyed upon by relatives and unscrupulous stock salesmen is, as lurid as it is, unfortunately, common. The trust keeps the principal as intact as it is humanly possible to do; pays an income to the widow as long as she lives; looks after the schooling of the children in the event of the widow's death; gives the children, more often in the case of sons than in that of daughters, a share of the principal at an age when, if ever, they should have discretion. (The reason for continuing the trust in favor of daugh

ters is to protect them against the dissipation of their capital through unwise investments of husbands; also because of the lower earning power of women.) These results, in the case of an $80,000 estate, are accomplished at an annual cost, paid from income, of something like $400 or $500.

In these days an estate of this size is not a large one. Even if the estate is half or quarter this size, the reasons for putting it into a trust are identical and even more cogent. The less you have, the more carefully you must guard it. Not long ago a certain trust company issued a circular which pictured two men standing before a burning house. One asks the owner, "Were you insured?" The owner replies: "No; I was waiting till I got a bigger house." Very few people nowadays, no matter the size of their dwelling, fail to cover it with insurance. But the majority of people whose worldly goods are not many do fail to insure their protection after their death. And beyond question the reason for this failure is either that they did not know that it was possible to effect such insurance by means of a trust, or they thought that trusts were "for the rich."

Life insurance, as we have previously pointed out, can be arranged so that, on death, it will be paid into a trust, and thus insure its protection and the protection of the person or persons for whom it was primarily taken out.

The subject of estate protection is, we think, properly a subject to be included in any discussion of investing and investments. A trust is, after all, a kind of super-investment of a man's entire property. What is the use of all the care and attention given to investments if their ultimate disposition, which must occur by law upon the death of their owner, is not sedulously planned? Has a man done a complete job of it when he merely writes in his will that he leaves everything to his wife? Is he sure that what he leaves will accomplish the purpose which he would like to have accomplished?

Ironically enough, those who have large fortunes also have financial and legal contacts which, without much exertion on their part, inform them as to the best means of protecting their property. The people who have small fortunes or property so little as not to be classified as a "fortune" are all too apt to live on doing nothing, vaguely conscious, perhaps, that there is something that they might and could well do. For them, first of all, these paragraphs have been written. W. L. S.

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I

The Old Christmas Magic

HAVE lately been walking upon a street where Christmas is dead. It stretches a long way across a great city; shops big and little are on either side, and from one to the other, ever since Thanksgiving Day, strings of electric bulbs have been stretched, so that in the evening you walk with the wind. blowing but beneath a glittering roof; you would not know that there was a star in the sky. On the fourth floor of every large shop, between sporting goods and upholstery, a tired salesman in red trousers with horsehair under his chin shakes hands all day with such children as have brought with them buying parents. He is a real Santa Claus. Beside him sometimes stands a real reindeer, rolling dead glass eyes and lifting a stiff foot in clockwork geniality. In the windows of the smaller shops Santa himself is clockwork; all day, save for run-down intervals of immobility, he smiles an ingenious rubber smile, pointing to the real toys about him, marked in plain prices. For everything on this street is real; there is nothing that you may not buy and break.

One day I saw a little girl, some ten years old perhaps, her back to one of these windows, regarding with a curious wonderment a musician performing at the curb. He was playing upon a saxophone "God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen." But the child had no money, and in time he moved to a more profitable position. As he went the lovely faint look of wonder was wiped out of her eyes, that went ranging once more over the stands of real post-cards, crying their mass-production wish for "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year." But Christmas was dead on that

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By MARY LAMBERTON BECKER

Author of "Adventures in Reading"

light as lighted the doll's house in Katherine Mansfield's story, so shining that a child hunted from that paradise could yet murmur, "I seen the little light." Lights on the Christmas tree have this magic, and the old ornaments coming back every year, waking on Christmas Eve from their long sleep, shine through such a luminous haze of dream. The voice singing carols, however cracked, carries such mystery. It is the heart of the Christmas spirit. Now that carols come by way of the phonograph or struggle through loudspeakers with the uproar of a thoroughfare, now that resolute salesmanship provides for our children a concrete commercial Christmas, it is worth taking thought to see that in their holiday books, at least, something of the glamour remains. At this time, if ever, let there be some books of wonder -fairy tales, legends, poetry, lovely plays, history rich in amazement, adventure, romance. If you have yourself forgotten the tales of wonder, try reading aloud from "The Fountain of Youth" (Macmillan), a choice of folkstories arranged by Padraic Colum for actual telling, in such words as carry through to the imagination and set it making its own images.

But with the littlest children pictures may carry the tale without words. There are, for instance, scarcely more words in William Nicholson's "Clever Bill" (Doubleday) than are needed to say that a wooden soldier, left at home on a journey, ran until he reached the place before the child himself, and was waiting for him upon the door-mat. But what pictures-full of the determination and action of Bill himself! "The Skin Horse," by Margery Bianco (Doran), has the pictures of young Pamela Bianco; the story is of a toy horse, battered but adored by a children's ward, going to pieces and thrown away while

one child is too ill to know it, and so missed that the Christmas Angel must somehow bring him back. At this point the pictures, thus far languid and tender in line and color, suddenly rise to an outburst of joyous elaboration with the appearance of the heavenly visitor and the beginning of the starry ride. In quite another way, there is magic in the scarlets and greens, the strong shapes and strange landscapes of the illustrations in "Children of the Mountain Eagle," by Elizabeth Miller (Doubleday, Page), a story of children in Albania, vivid as the pictures.

Perhaps all children in books are creatures of glamour-all that live, that is. and take their places in the lives of children. Alice comes out of Wonderland, a real child, but Heidi, a real child, takes children into a sort of wonderland of her own. Louise Connolly's "Miss Chatterbox and Her Family" (Macmillan) is about a real child, a "smaht chile" who lived in Washington just after the Civil War, and whose cat was near-sighted because, though he could see a moving string, he could not see the Capitol This child bounces with vitality; older readers will take to her as soon as chil dren will. Older readers like Christopher Robin as well as children do no better, for children make up for an older comprehension by loving him with a whole-heartedness of which maturity is hardly capable. "Now We Are Six, the new Milne book (Dutton), takes child with the aid of Mr. Shepard' drawings into a sunny country wher everything is in scale, where the chil himself, as in "Winnie, the Pooh," is beneficent providence to all the toys and, in his weakness, a strength and wisdom to his world.

I do not know how successful ha been the attempt of some writers ie (Continued on page 539)

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