Abbe

CARROLL MCCOMAS IN "MISS LULU

BETT"

but the Hapsburg par excellence is of course Charles. He is still the anointed King of Hungary. He never has abdicated or been dethroned. His person is sacred and inviolable. Why, then, should he not return at the appropriate moment and again be invested with the crown of St. Stephen?

Some days ago Charles thought that such an appropriate moment had arrived. Disguised, he escaped from Switzerland and entered Hungary. He was received with mixed sensations. The Regent, Horthy, did not want to receive him at all. A strong faction in the Hungarian National Assembly declared that "the ex-Emperor's unexpected return is seen as a national peril." On the other hand, many monarchists gave him welcome. But all were alarmed at the immediate proclamation by the Governments of Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Jugoslavia that the return of Charles to the throne would not be tolerated. This protest was formally reinforced by the Governments of Great Britain, France, and Italy.

None of these governments wish to interfere in Hungarian domestic affairs. But this is not a domestic affair. It concerns all southeastern Europe, and so it concerns the peace of the world.

MISS LULU BETT

HE story of Cinderella is not new. But then very few stories are. We can think of nothing of less consequence than the newness or oldness of a dramatic theme. What is of concern is the vitality of a story, a factor which depends on treatment rather than upon such elements of character and plot as may be reduced to a diagram in a textbook on the drama.

The story of Cinderella lies behind the story of "Lulu Bett." It is a story which of itself has always a broad human appeal, for most of us are inclined, at times, to see ourselves in the garb of Cinderella. When we see Cinderella among her ashes, we say: "How like ourselves! Only of course Cinderella never was quite so badly abused as we have been." When we see Cinderella triumph, we say, "Just what we would do if we had our deserts!" Self-pity and wishful thinking are still to be classed among the favorite recreations of mankind.

"Lulu Bett," to return to the place where this editorial should have been started, is a dramatization by Zona Gale of her very widely read novel of the same name. Her heroine is a spinster of thirty-four years and many tribulations, whose age should be measured, not by its annual increments, but in terms of the monotonous life she has been forced to endure.

Lulu lives with her sister and her sister's husband. In return for the home which they give her she has turned her. self into an untiring drudge, with no expectation of escaping from the tyranny of little things. Her sister is vain, shallow, and selfish. Her brother-in-law is pompous, dictatorial, and self-righteous. Both of them are amazingly well pleased with themselves for their kindness in giving Lulu the shelter of their roof-tree. They are possessed of two children, the younger of whom in particular impels the spectator to reach out for nonexistent hair-brushes at her every appearance upon the stage. She is certainly one of the most spankable stage children we have seen in many years.

The sixth member of the family group is the mother of Lulu and her sister, an aged woman bordering upon senility, whose mind combines attributes of keenness and understanding with that tragic forgetfulness which marks the approach of oblivion. The mother is played by Louise Closser Hale, and her characterization constitutes one of the best pieces of acting which we have seen on the New York stage this season.

Into this family group comes the brother of the head of the house, a rover and an open-hearted good fellow, whose ways have led him far from the restricted circle of his brother's life.

LOUISE CLOSSER HALE IN "MISS LULU BETT"

He is quick, to feel the injustice of Lulu's position and she to desire his understanding and sympathy. The old stage device of a mock marriage which turns out to be binding is used to crystallize their feeling for each other. They depart, leaving a helpless and astounded family circle, whose attitude may be summed up in the words, "Blessings brighten as they take their flight."

But Lulu is not quit. of them yet. Her husband tells her that many years before he was married and that he has no definite proof that his first wife is dead. She returns to the house whence she fled so joyfully to find that her sister and her brother-in-law are concerned only with the effect of her misfortune upon their own reputations. The pettiness and smallness of their point of view is an unpleasant thing to contemplate, but it is not overdrawn. Such people exist entire in the flesh, and the elements which go to make up the minds of such people exist in part in bundreds of men and women who would doubtless hold up their hands in horror at the treatment meted out to Lulu.

If in the play it had not been finally shown that Lulu's husband's first wife was definitely and conclusively dead, we should never have forgiven

Gale. The play left at the final curtain more than enough unsolved relationships and enough unhappiness to justify this concession to the conventional desire for a happy ending. We are inclined to classify "Miss Lulu Bett." among the truest and most convincing of this year's dramatic offerings.

THE CALL OF THE

whether Ireland should be a republic or a province; what should be the boundaries of Poland; or how the geographical and political problems of the chaotic "Near East" should be solved. In attempting to solve these problems it is already evident that France, Italy, and England have fallen apart. The representative of each country naturally, perhaps necessarily, looks after the interests of that country; and the countries

B

EFORE this issue of The Outlook reaches its readers a petition will probably have been signed by a few notable Americans to the Prime Ministers of England, France, and Italy, protesting against any policy which will leave the Armenian people under the government of the unspeakable Turk. All humane Americans, remembering the tragedies of the past, will hope that the statesmen to whom it is addressed will give it careful consideration.

What part ought America to take in European affairs? When does interference become offensive intermeddling? When does abstention mean selfish apathy? It is not difficult to define the determining principle on paper, though it may be difficult to apply that principle in dealing with international problems.

What action the Allies should have taken when Germany asked for terms of peace, though possibly doubtful then, is certainly clear now. The answer should have been, "Unconditional surrender." The surrender required should have been so unconditioned that the Allies could, if they saw fit, have put Germany in the hands of a receiver and collected by an international execution the reparation due from her to Belgium and France. Instead, the statesmen made terms with Germany and set themselves to the task of making "a new map of Europe." The result is what has been felicitously termed a "Peace Tangle."

There is no good reason why America should join in continuing this international blunder.

America entered the war to protect the world, primarily Belgium and France, from the despotic rule of military Germany. Germany should understand that our alliance with England, France, and Belgium continues until Germany's rulers confess Germany's defeat and make provision for adequate reparation to France and Belgium. The reports from Washington at this writing indicate that the present Administration has made this clear to Germany. In so doing it has the substantially unanimous support of the American people.

But there is no reason why America should take any part in making "a new map of Europe." She has neither the knowledge nor the interest necessary.

is not our business to determine

America has no interests which impel her to take part in the game of grab, and no international wisdom to justify her in offering to act as a supreme arbitrator.

In 1902, passing through the city of Trebizond, on the Black Sea, I was a guest of the British Consul at luncheon. He had been there for twenty-five years, and had just returned from a visit to England. His.solution of the then acute Eastern question was very simple: make Constantinople a free city and put it under the protectorate of the United States. All the Powers, he assured me, would welcome that solution because they all knew that we had no territorial ambitions. Something like a year ago I attended a meeting of a committee of the friends of Armenia. They all agreed in the wish that the United States would take a mandatory for Armenia, if not for Turkey in Asia Minor, and experts present bore the same testimony as the British Consul in Trebizond: all the European Powers, they said, would welcome our acceptance of the trust, for they all know that we have no territorial ambitions. To join in the attempt to make "a new map of Europe" would imperil a disinterestedness which is due more to our geographical position than to our virtue, and we would certainly lose the reputation of disinterestedness which we now possess. We should throw away a great influence and we should not gain a compensatory power. If America did not become an ally of one of the Great Powers, it would fall under the alternating suspicion of them all.

There is one thing America can do, ought to do, and we are reasonably confident will do so long as this Administration is in power. It can protect the property and personal rights of its citizens on land and on sea, at home and abroad. There are in Asiatic Turkey millions of dollars invested in American property and hundreds of Americans engaged in the entirely lawful occupation of publishing, teaching, and preaching. They have been, and still are, scrupulous in obeying the laws of the land in which they live. They and their lawful interests and occupations are entitled to the protection of their native land.

To finish the work which we began in 1917; to give our moral and, if neces

sary, our financial and military support to the demand that Germany repair, as far as reparation is possible, the wrong she has committed; to protect American rights always and everywhere, whatever the cost; to give our moral but unofficial support to every honest, sincere, and intelligent endeavor to maintain civil and religious liberty in other lands; and to abstain from all participation in the endeavor of the Great Powers to reapportion the peoples and redefine the boundaries of other nationalities, is the best international service America can render to the world in its present crisis. LYMAN ABBOTT.

JOHN BURROUGHS,
NATURALIST

HE story is told that on one of the camping trips John Burroughs loved to take with his friends a farmer's permission was asked to camp on his land. "Who are these fellows?" he inquired. One after the other the messenger named a famous inventor, a big Washington official, and a millionaire manufacturer. Their names meant nothing to the farmer, but when John Burroughs's name was mentioned he knew all about the "bird-man" and was delighted to give permission. Burroughs wrote for farmers and city people and lovers of nature at large, rather than for scientists. He was first of all a naturalist; he says, in his "Field and Study," "I seem to reach nature through my understanding and the desire for knowledge more than through any ethical or purely poetical craving." He was the observer and recorder, not the biologist or the technician. He purposely limited his field of observationhe said lately that perhaps the West Indies would come to him, he didn't care to go that far; "once," he added, "I lost a February in Jamaica." The Harriman Alaska trip with John Muir and others was an exception; and in the monumental and beautiful volumes describing that trip Burroughs wrote more popularly, if less eloquently and dramatically, than Muir himself-as might be expected, for Muir was the man of action, Burroughs the naturalist-essayist.

What Burroughs saw he made other people see. His memory was as good as his powers of observation; he could and did write-without referring to any notes taken-lucidly and fully of bird life and animal life and nature as he had known it years ago. It was largely his ability to tell common people as distinct from students of science the everydays facts of nature that made Theodore Roosevelt write, "It is a good thing for our people that you have lived."

Mr. Burroughs was poet and philoso

pher, as well as naturalist and describer, but it is rather in the field of writing of the latter than that of the former that he will be longest remembered. His earlier style in essay writing was often turgid, and his earlier poems had conspicuous faults; but in both respects he improved as he continued to write. As a philosopher, and especially as regards immortality and the relations of this life to the future, John Burroughs was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that his boyhood was spent in an atmosphere of narrow views of religion; like many other writers so placed, he conceived a distorted idea of what even "orthodox" theology is like, to say nothing of modern liberal ideas. His latest published book, for instance, "Accepting the Universe," is based on the assumption that God is reflected in the material phenomena, and it is an effective reply to the shallow optimism of a certain type of "natural theology" which existed in his boyhood, but was not of high repute in scholarly circles even then. Of the spiritual faith that God is spirit and is reflected in the spiritual experiences of man he seems to have had little conception. John Burroughs died on March 29,

within a few days of his eighty-fourth birthday, while returning, after a winter spent in California in search of strength and health, to the home in the Catskills he loved so well and so long. He was a man of many friendships; in earlier life he knew Emerson, Holmes, Whitman, and Lincoln; later his yearly camping trips with Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone were a delight to him and gave him many pleasing memories. While he knew New Eng. land well, his observations and descriptions are for the most part of the country right about him-and that means not so very many miles from the metrop

T

HE body of John Burroughs was laid to rest on April 3, his birthday, and at Roxbury, New York, his birthplace.

At the simple burial services were men of distinction, among them naturalists and writers; but most significant of all was the gathering of his neighbors who came with home-made luncheons for the guests from other places. Among these neighbors were many children. As the friends of Burroughs passed by, a ring-necked pheasant came out into the road. John Burroughs's body lies under a great rock on the hill which he himself had chosen for burial.

olis. "The place to observe nature is where you are," is one of his sayings. Farming, nature study, and literature occupied most of his time the last forty years of his life, but before that he had been in turn teacher, treasury clerk, and bank examiner. Those who had familiar converse with him agree that his informal talk was even more delightful than his books. Among his collected writings probably “Wake Robin,” “Freshi Fields," and "Ways of Nature" best represent his sympathy with living things and his love for the outdoor life.

Long ago, on one of John Burroughs's birthdays, which it became a kind of custom for the press as well as his intimates to celebrate, this journal, under the title "John Burroughs, Neighbor," pointed out that his simplicity, sincerity, and kindliness made John Burroughs, so to speak, the companion and neighbor of the whole country; and that "no man has made nature quite so companionable, or. given such a large number of people a sense of being at home out of doors, as this farmer's boy, who has added to his early knowledge the observation of many years and a wide acquaintance with science."

J

гOHN BURROUGHS says it is really Ping Street; that the mountain people corrupted it into Pink Street. But either name is an engaging misnomer for the narrow green glen that lies between the drop of a Catskill hill and a foaming, stone-carpeted brook nearly as wide as the Street itself, full of water whirls that fling about big boulders and fill the Street with noisy rushing. It is no more a street than it is pink, nor does it convey any idea of ping, which somehow savors of an Orientalism quite alien to that woods dale.

But I didn't know all that when one night in August, 1914, the train set me down in Roxbury and I found my way to Mrs. Taylor's modest boarding-house. After supper she told me all the pleasant things to do: the garden party at "the Gould place"-everybody went to that; "and of course you're going up to Woodchuck Lodge to see Johnny Burroughs?"

I demurred. Does the vacationer run post-haste to Woodchuck Lodge and intrude on this charming writer of the outdoors?

"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Taylor, emphatically. "Why, everybody goes up to see him. He expects people to come. My daughter goes up first thing every summer. She's read all his books and can quote them to him. You go right along up. There's a short cut across the swamp."

A very insidious notion, that. One I could just walk over that way, anyway, and see the cabin. After dinner next day I set out, and in the middle of the swamp discovered it to be a sea of black stumps in black ooze. Impossible to go back. I'd at least jump forward and maybe I'd get past those stumps. Yellow Dog Dingo jumped, because he had to another black stump.

At the very last stump I sat down to regard the back of Woodchuck Lodge, and looked instead into the inquiring eye of a young bullock whose anxieties were quickened by his resentment at not being quite tall enough to get his whole head over the intervening wall at one time. He had to thrust his nose over first to snort his outrage and then dip it ignominiously in order to bring one eye over the top to watch its effect.

Breathing hard, I walked slowly out of his enraged sight and thanked Heaven for a long stride.

Two fields and the highroad, and just down the road Woodchuck Lodge on the hillside; a low cabin of slender boles one couldn't say "logs" to them-with a porch, and John Burroughs sitting on the porch.

His profile was toward me as he sat in a little low rocking chair reading a newspaper, with a pile of more newspapers on the floor beside him. A big straw farm hat was pushed back so that

it framed his fresh-colored, singularly youthful face, with his white hair showing under the brim and his long white beard over the gray seersucker coat he wore.

A woman sat with her back to the road and several cots were placed across the back of the porch against the wall.

Slower and slower I walked. I was nearly opposite I was passing. John Burroughs looked up from his paper and smiled, rose, and called out: "Come in, come in. We watched you crossing that swamp."

The woman whose back was toward the road-she turned out to be Dr. Barrus-came to meet me, and on the porch Mrs. Burroughs was resting on one of the cots.

Mrs. Taylor's daughter had the better of me. Not a single quote rushed to my ease. Indeed, as I sat in a third little rocker listening to my host's friendly chat I felt as though the high and far-off days of "Pepacton" and "Locust and Wild Honey," all of those earlier books fresh from the hills and open fields—I had not read the later ones were days of another existence before the world was too much with us.

We talked of the hills and village, of the orchard on the hill across the road and the busy life up there in bough and grass, and of my work, forsooth!

John Burroughs had picked up a news

paper among the newly arrived mail, and now he opened it while Dr. Barrus told me of some near-by walks.

"Damn!" he cried suddenly, flung the newspaper to the floor, stamped off the porch, down the steps, and around the cabin, and immediately came the sound of violent. wood-chopping.

I looked, at Dr. Barrus, aghast. "Did I do that?" I asked, appalled. "No, I think it was the Kaiser." She looked at the crumpled newspaper. It was in August, 1914, you remember.

"He chops more and more wood every day now when the mail comes in," she explained.

He came back in a moment and took up another paper.

"Was it the Kaiser-" I began.

"Damn the Kaiser!" he burst out, and there followed one of those bewildering struggles. to reach out for the halfknown, wholly unaccustomed words that would express the incredible, the impossible all those things so startling, so unbelievable.in August, 1914, amid which we learned, to walk with such practiced familiarity in the ruins. of northern France in 1918. And how should John Burroughs, of all people, cope with so utterly alien a vocabulary?

They planned hospitably for my coming to dinner next day, and presently I left them, starting back by the road John Burroughs pointed out as the prettiest way home-the one to the left of Woodchuck Lodge. It turned sharply against the sky-line by the woods and then dipped into the valley, past covetable cottages in tidy green gardens, with old apple trees from which I pulled sour and leathery apples that nevertheless had an irresistible pungency of wild flavor. And I went down musing on the surprise and charm of finding that old-fashioned country hospitality serenely fixed as the daily habit of this outdoor lover who had withal so much natural human kindliness-more, such love for folks-that he really did "expect people to come up."

Why do we give to some folk the full measure of their names? Nobody says Walton; it would mean nothing. But Izaak Walton! And Burroughs is a babel of business. But John Burroughs!

Next morning woke me to a wind fresh and crisp as October, with the maples tossing tumultuously across my windows, flinging their gleaming leaves in the sunlight.

"Telephone for you!" came a call from below stairs. "Johnny Burroughs says wait here till they come. They're going on a picnic to Pink Street instead of having dinner at home, and they'll be right down."

Hardly had I finished coffee when the little Ford car rushed down upon us, John Burroughs driving, Professor L. beside him, and Mrs. Burroughs and Dr. Barrus behind, whither I, too, climbed as soon as I had fetched the sweater they all simultaneously called upon me to bring. Now if you happily knew John Burroughs, you know how unaffectedly right the word "rushed" is when followed by "John Burroughs driving."

We rollicked down the road hillwards till a stretch of mud, hub deep, as we could see by the approaching motor pulling through it, brought us to slow and labored going, each ear trying to give place to the other, but John Burroughs's courtesy winning. There for an instant our engine strove so vainly that the passing travelers came back to lend a hand; but an extra tug and we were out and up the hill, the mud whirled off, having no chance to dry in that flight.

A dip into the hills, a turn from the open road down a lane and around a foothill and John Burroughs brought the car neatly to the middle of the secluded glen.

"Pink Street!"

We camped by the brook, John Burroughs and Professor L. bringing some planks they found in a deserted barn at the end of Pink Street, while the rest of us spread a cloth and unpacked lunch

eon.

And John Burroughs sat on a plank sandwich in one hand and a crisp cucumber in the other-cucumbers at sev

enty-seven!-and we chatted between bites; just the desultory chat of any picnic. It was then that John Burroughs told me that Pink Street is really Ping Street, and in the sudden warmth of argument Professor L. got a picture of him, sandwich, cucumber, and all, and me beside him-immortalized! And another one when John Burroughs went over and cranked the car to find out something mysterious. I've always wondered what the camera made of that figure bent before the car and that whirling arm! I like to remember that Professor L. told us of a roomful of negatives at home, negatives of John Burroughs in every walk of life, and to think that perhaps he will one day share those intimate photographs with the hosts who will delight in them.

Those two went off hill wards after luncheon, Mrs. Buroughs settled down with a book by the stream, and Dr. Barrus and I crossed the brook. Half-way up a rugged path we came upon a little widespread evergreen branching screenlike over a rock by the path, a