ENTERTAINMENTS AT WHICH WE HAVE NEVER ASSISTED. SIGNALLING THE APPROACH OF A SCHOOL OF WINKLES. "THE MUCKLE HART." (A memory of CHARLES ST. JOHN'S " Wild Sports.") BEST of the beasts of the printed fable Or the fact imprinted-the stage was set, To meet a Destiny (Honest Injun)- The Muckle Hart of his high Benmore. Was ever such ground to "pick up" a stag on? Did not I love a Reluctant Dragon? And Krag, the Ram of the Kootenay? I've stood with Allan (old Quatermain) Ah, what if I've toyed with a ton of others, He, he shall stand when the janwars pall, For oh, and exceedingly oh, my brothers, The Hart, I fell for him first of all! Best of my beasts in fact and fable The fire was bright and the pane was wet, The book lay wide on a schoolroom tableThat's how it was on the day we met; Chin in the cleft of the hands a-hollow, Eyes that popped at a golden loreYes, that was the way when I went to follow First the Hart of Benmore, Benmore. Family Contracts. P. R. C. "The writer, after making a purchase at the above-mentioned factory, happened to sit down with his wife and three children supplied by Bros., and greatly appreciated by we Dublin people." From a letter to a Dublin Paper. Us English people don't care to get our ties ready-made. The Compleat Cannibal. "Francis Bacon praised the strawberry for its excellent cordial' effects. Linnæus recommended that the fruit be plentifully eaten for the relief of gout; and Izaak Walton eaten for the relief of gout." Birmingham Paper. "JERUSALEM, Sunday. The formalities connected with his extradition having been concluded, the Palestinian later he escaped, and for sixteen years had was captured in March last, is now to be sent back to the French penal colony to complete his sentence."-Daily Paper. Perhaps this sentence had better not have been begun. American Tourist (to his son, who is complaining about the abominable food supplied at an English country inn). "SAY, JUNIOR, CUT THAT OUT. RE-MEMBER YOU'RE IN ANCIENT ENGLAND, AND PRABABLY ASS-ISTING AT A MEDIEVAL CERE-MONY!" 16th. I suppose the habit of burying bones goes back to a very early period of canine history (being a phase of the squirrel-and-nut principle), so we cannot justly blame our bright little Sam for his inherited propensities. At the same time his selection of my herbaceous border as the invariable site for his funeral rites is a little disconcerting. My delphiniums-but if one goes in for a dog one must expect minor inconveniences. still in Sam's presence. I wish I could showed the idea was beginning to take "There you are," I said; "you can bury as many as you like here; it is your bit of garden. distinctly interesting, this endeavour to get inside the dog mind, and, though I have so little experience, I feel somehow that I have a flair for it. Twice more during the day I took him down the garden and solemnly buried a bone; I am almost sure he understands now. hymeneal). I did this without mis- 17th. Two excavations in the border 19th. The matter is becoming to-day and three Canterbury bells up- 18th. I suppose the dog mind is serious; Sam produced fourteen bones rooted. Some people would have been really more labyrinthine than one im-to-day and seems to have no idea of annoyed, but not I. "Here," I said to agines. Sam has somehow misintermyself, "is a young and amiable animal, preted the purport of yesterday's operagleaming with intelligence, who has in- tions and has apparently formed the herited a habit of burying bones. What opinion that I too am a member of the is the right course for a man of humane bone-burying fraternity. While I was temperament to pursue with him? The in the garden this morning he brought answer came in a flash. Taking a trowel a large and angular bone and planked and summoning Sam, I disinterred the it down at my feet. The family fairly two bones in his presence and carried rose at him. them to the bottom of the garden, where I have a bit of rough ground. There, with studied elaboration, I buried them, "Oh, the darling!" they cried; "he wants you to go and bury it." Frankly I was not displeased; it burying them himself either in the herbaceous border or the place I have allotted to him. He just brings the confounded things along and places them joyously at my feet, saying (with eyes and ears), "Here you are, my dear old fellow-conspirator-another glorious funeral!" Where he finds them all I can't imagine; certainly our appetites for meat in the domestic circle cannot account for their numbers. I have glared at him (power of the human eye) THE NEW STAR IN THE FILM FIRMAMENT. SUGGESTED TYPICAL ROLES FOR MR. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, WHO, IN THE MOVIETONE AT THE NEW GALLERY, GIVES AN IMPERSONATION OF SIGNOR MUSSOLINI. and waved to the bottom of the garden. (power of suggestion), but he simply wags his stump of a tail and indicates the recumbent bone. Mrs. Marshall was here to tea in the afternoon, and she suddenly startled me by asking, "Do you find it difficult to train your dog?' Instinctively I glanced down at Sam, and to my horror saw that something resembling the framework of a rabbit was lying at my feet. "Well," I said, covering it as much as I could, "I am trying-er-moral suasion; animals require moral suasion, you know." "They do," she answered, and it struck me there was something unnecessarily dogmatic in her tone. After all, anyone can thrash a dog, but the humane man seeks another and better way. It is not easy, though. 20th.-A dreadful happening in church; I go hot when I think of it. The doors are, of course, kept open now, and in the middle of the sermon I was appalled to see Sam walk up the aisle carrying what looked like a spinal section of a dinosaurus. I strove to ignore him and concentrate on the sermon, but the clever dog, after sniffing at the members of the congregation who occupied seats adjacent to the aisle, detected me and, trotting up, deposited the ghastly relic just outside my pew. RUSSIAN BALLET (HIS MAJESTY'S). The drop-curtain shows us one of The new STRAVINSKY ballet, Apollo those naïve Utopian scenes now so Musagetes, was hailed with delighted common, into which several exaggerenthusiasm by those clever young per-atedly cretinous females not designed sons who make up the more vociferous in the Praxitelean mode have apparently section of M. SERGE DIAGHILEFF's many strayed from the local hostel for the admirers. I thought I detected a slight feeble-minded. It rises to disclose a hesitation, as of puzzlement, among cave with Leto(Madame SOPHIE ORLOVA) the elderly and less quick-witted. The astride the mouth of a cave whence in paths of modernism are steep, and old due course hops the golden-haired sunfogeys, however painstakingly alert they god (M. SERGE LIFAR) in swaddling may be, find it increasingly difficult to clothes. follow the divagations of the experi- Two attendant goddesses (Mmes. DORA mentalists. We have haunting mem- VADIMOVA and HENRIETTE MAIKERSKA), ories of a beauty which enthralled us in having unceremoniously unswaddled the past when M.DIAGHILEFF was merely him, tactfully revealing abbreviated a revolutionary, not a modernist. Now I white swathings that partially concealed HASELDEN. STEPS TO PARNASSUS. Terpsichore, Calliope and Polymnia .... MMES. ALICE NIKITINA, Apollo Musagetes. After which he indicated a desire for me to adjourn for the funeral. LUBOV TCHERNICHEVA AND FELIA DOUBROVSKA. . . M. SERGE LIFAR. blood-red pants, the god hesitatingly tries his admirable limbs. Gaining skill from exercise he proceeds to various extremely odd gymnastic feats, such as lying on his stomach upon the upturned soles of a goddess's feet, after the manner of those who would learn the first principles of the breaststroke. Essaying the sitting posture he disdains, conceivably out of ignorance, the simple method adopted by mere mortals, and god-like hurls himself sideways at the rock and, not surprisingly, makes a poor landing-at which crisis a grimace, whether of anguish or of stifled amusement, spread over we are more frequently startled or exas- the features of M. LIFAR, who till that perated-even sometimes, let us con- moment had resolutely avoided expressThere was no help for it; I had to fess, a trifle bored. No doubt "move-ing any recognisable emotion. act. I do not know what impression I ment" is necessary, but need one believe Proceeding with his business, which conveyed as I walked out with my hat that all movements, without regard to is the founding of three Museships, and gloves in one hand and the evil-direction, are equally admirable? Apollo inducts three goddesses (clad looking bone in the other, but I know Mr. IGOR STRAVINSKY has apparently inevitably, perhaps, in muslin skirts the Marshalls smiled in an irritating sort of way and our worthy Vicar looked distinctly peeved. Sam, serenely happy, trotted along behind me. What he thought of our subsequent interview I cannot say, but I know now that there are some aspects of a dog's intelligence which only react to STICK. "A defendant at Hanley Police Court to-day talked like a character from Dickens. Some of his phrases-highly reminiscent of Mrs. Malaprop-were: The payments were disem: burgements.' 'I contend that the money was mutilitated from my wages." Staffordshire Paper. Reminiscent too of SHERIDAN'S Mrs. Gamp. invented the general outline of this but, less intelligibly, wearing the neatest "piece without a plot " for which, in yet of Deauville bathing-caps) into their new another of his many moods, a mood offices: Terpsichore (Madame ALICE strangely enough of classical pastiche NIKITINA) for the control of choral dance not of iconoclasm, he has written the and song; Calliope (Madame LUBOV music. The significance of this ballet, TCHERNICHEVA) for epic poetry, and whether in detail or in general, is so Polymnia (Madame FELIA DOUBROVSKA) difficult to seize that one has little atten- for the sublime ode. This done, a fourtion to give to the music and therefore in-hand chariot that had evidently been may rightly hesitate to pass judgment borrowed for the occasion out of the upon it at a first hearing. If we property-room of the Chauve-Souris is accept the composer's newly-assumed slung down from the flies to take the technique as an attempt to give an new god to the peaks of Olympus. appropriate setting to his classical I have not the faintest notion what theme we shall have to put ourselves it all signified, and while it was obvious into a distinctly neo-classical mood to that the technical achievement-parappreciate M. BALANCHIN's choreo- | ticularly in the difficult slow tortuous movements-was admirable, it was Delilah's part are obviously addressed arms, with her theatrical friends. difficult to catch any hint of beauty in by his wife to the complacent Sophus, drinking his wine and eating his sandthe design. Oue remembered NIJINSKY, who is in the theatre to supply the furni- wiches. With the gesture of SAMSON the faun, and the lovely shy nymphs in the brake, and had to remind oneself sternly that that sort of thing is simply not done nowadays. It isn't in the mode. The gaiety of Cimarosiana and the old-fashioned graces and pantomime splendours of The Fire Bird seemed to me much more worth the enthusiasm of the first-night reception than this latest of the DIAGHILEFF experiments. What a tiresome thing it is to be behind one's time! T. "SAMSON AND THE PHILISTINES (LITTLE). Passionately preferring the delights of intellectual conversation in the foyer to assembling in their stalls, the enlightened members of the International Theatre were responsible for the curtain rising a full twenty minutes late on SVEN LANGE'S Samson and the Philistines, which is bad, because it irritates the ordinary Philistine and makes the players nervous. He Evidently in Denmark they still take the poet in the theatre seriously. We have of course entirely banished him from ours. Peter Krumbak, the poet, has written a play in verse, Samson and Delilah, a grim and savage satire. He has married a wife, a gipsy-whether a gipsy by blood or merely by temperament was not quite clear to me. is passionately, slavishly in love with his Dagmar. Her ardour has evidently cooled. She doesn't like the way he dresses or eats; she has not read his play, which has been sent to the Director of the Thalia Theatre, where she is leading lady. Evidently Sophus Meyer, the successful furnituredealer, has captured her wandering fancy. But she can lie quite successfully about it "before God" to her simple-minded poet, who humbly waits for sham crumbs of love to be thrown to him. HASELDEN THE UNSUCCESSFUL PLAYWRIGHT'S SOLACE. bringing down the pillars of his house upon himself and his enemies he drives them terrorstricken into the street. Only remains the Director to soften his despair by suggesting that he is well rid of a baggage and free to devote his life to poetrythough he puts the matter a shade more tactfully. was. It seemed to me there was going to be sound meat in this play, though I had my misgivings when I saw what a tailor's dummy of a man Sophus Meyer No mate for a gipsy, this. Whether the producer had insisted on a cruder brand of comic relief than the author intended, I do not quite know. I should think it probable. Anyhow when we came to the rehearsal scene, with the actor who played Samson exaggerating his ineffectiveness to the point of imbecility, it was clear that the laughs were gained at the expense of the serious structure of the play. Clearly there was amusement to be extracted from the rehearsal scene, and the poet himself was supposed to have a sardonic sense of humour; but to play it as a farce was, I feel sure, to flout the author's intentions. Mr. ION SWINLEY made for us a living, angry, jealous, deeplysuffering man out of Krumbak and carried the play on his shoulders. An interesting performance. Perhaps Miss OLGA LINDO was miscast for the part of the wife didn't feel happy in it as she certainly played below her form. Of Mr. GEORGE SKILLAN's portrait of the lover I am quite sure it was badly out of drawing, and would venture to suggest that the play is enough to deserve the alteration of method necessary to make it convincing. Mr. RICHARD COKE was effectively amusing as the bored and cynical Stage Manager, and Mr. ROBERT LANG contributed a careful study of the old Director who sympathises with the young poet. "MICHAEL ORME and Miss KITTY WILLOUGHBY have translated the play successfully into our native idiom, perhaps with The play has been accepted. The Stage Manager thinks it poor stuff, at any rate from a box-office point of view. The Director however sees the hand of genius in it and, against his commercial | ture and fabrics. Peter savagely assaults too conscientious an effort to be bright judgment, insists on the production. In his rival, wanders into the woods and and slangful. It runs easily and naturrehearsal the poet finds that the passion- returns after many days of hunger and ally, however, and that is much to be ate love-passages he has written in despair to find his wife in Meyer's thankful for. T. |