the trial. But of course the most striking thing in the performance was the presentation of Shylock himself, Here we had a noble victim, a victim not devoid of grace, possessed of uncommon dignity, with a voice whose occasionally tender tones as contrasted with his fierce outbursts of wrath accentuated the tragic pathos of the whole story. The final exit of the Jew was one of the most impressive things of all. He left the stage crushed, defeated, wounded in his tenderest emotions, a hero in ruins, humiliated, hopeless, and undone. After this the fifth act of playful comedy seemed almost a mockery. We were in no tune to listen to the gallantries of Bassanio, or even the beautiful scene between Lorenzo and Jessica after so stupendous a downfall.

Clearly, if this interpretation were pressed too far, it would be a departure from the real intention of the dramatist. Mr. Moscovitch gives us no reasons for liking the hero, except that he is a fine dominant creature, whose personality seems to overpower all the other characters. But he does not care to lessen or smooth over any of the ugly elements of the Jewish protagonist, and he emphasizes that particular quality which undoubtedly runs through the whole temperament. Passion is the kernel of his nature. It is passionate application that has given him his riches; it is passionate energy which explains every calculation and enables him to feed his hatred and work out his revenge in detail. He may be avaricious, but money is nothing to him in comparison with his desire to get even with his enemies. That, undoubtedly, is a true Shylock, a man to be feared and repelled, an Ishmaelite with his hand against every man's, because Christian men have turned him into the brute that he is.

The Daily Telegraph

TRAVELING IN ITALY

BY EDWARD STORER

TRAVELING is nearly always dramatic in Italy. In almost any compartment of the train you may happen to take one or more dramas will unfold themselves. Possibly, if you travel first class, you will journey more monotonously, more glacially. But in a second, or, better still, in a third class compartment, you will be sure of something exciting happening. Some one will tell his life story, there will be a passenger to regale the company with some strange happening in his native town, a dispute will arise, or the controller will find a soldier trying to ride on an ordinary train when he knows he ought to take the military tradotta. This latter incident is almost sure to happen on any journey of one hundred miles or so, especially now that discipline is a little relaxed. The soldier incident will provide interest for quite a long time. Some of the company will side with him and against the railway inspector, whose duty it is to make the soldier get down at the next stop and wait for the military train, which, like all military trains, will probably pass seven or eight hours later at some genial hour like three of the morning. Nearly the whole carriage will side with the soldier more or less vociferously and, according to his luck, he may be allowed to stay where he is till the next inspector comes along, or be turned out.

Italians expect drama when they are traveling, and look to one another for entertainment on the journey. They feel quite injured if people just sit still and read their papers. They usually avoid a carriage where there is a priest or friar, as these for some reason are supposed to prognosticate a

dull journey. The middle and lower class Italian regards a train journey much in the light of a visit to the theatre. I rather suspect a foreigner sitting quietly in a corner has much the same effect on him as a priest or an old lady, though old ladies can be very lively sometimes in Italian trains. The foreigner, for him, is a poor benighted being with a guide book, who can't speak Italian, much less be diverting. However, trains in Italy are very few and crowded nowadays, and one must get in where one can, whether there be friar or foreigner or President Wilson himself sitting in the

corner.

With practice and good will the foreigner may learn to acquit himself tolerably well in an Italian train. It is quite an art, and the master of it feels rather contented with himself. There is a whole code of small etiquette to learn. He will never be able to carry the thing off like a real Italian, if only for the question of the dialects. He cannot possibly hope to make a bella figura if he is suddenly confronted with a stranger whose talk he cannot understand. And it is above all necessary to make a bella figura, or cut a good figure, as we say, when you are traveling. Just as necessary as on the stage.

I don't know how many dialects there are in this wonderful country, but, hazarding a guess, I should say not less than fifty principal ones, with a hundred subdivisions. Some of the most genial and amusing men I have ever met in traveling spoke dialects which were almost incomprehensible to me. You may know Italian very well, but you will not understand much more than the drift of a Bolognese's conversation, while the wit of a Neapolitan will all be over your head. Even the Italians themselves do not understand all the dialects, but when

VOL. 16-NO. 816

they don't understand, they pretend to. In the Rome province alone, there must be a score of dialects, which are not only debased Italian, but contain ancient Italic words. Two villages ten miles apart may have distinct dialects, though, of course, the natives of one will quite readily understand the natives of the other. The northern dialects with their German-sounding words are very hard for a foreigner to grasp. Yet they are spoken by thousands, millions, indeed. The old rich Milanese families always speak Milanese in their homes, and only Italian when a visitor comes.

As travel for the Italians, especially those of the middle and lower classes, possesses something of the adventurous, they are always particularly wellmannered in trains. Not, indeed, that they are not always well-mannered, but this train politeness is a special thing. It is a genialness of people going to the theatre together. There is no such thing as a passenger's 'rights,' his right, for instance, to have the window open or shut if he faces it according to his pleasure, his right to the exact space allotted to him in the carriage. The philosophy seems to be: 'now we are in for an adventure which may be troublesome, but let's try and make it as jolly as possible.' The difference with France is remarkable. The French travel as if preparing for a combat, the English as if on a boring job, but the Italian travels as if at the play.

Traveling in France a few months ago, I witnessed a trifling incident, which, coming as I had from Italy, much impressed me. A French lady had had a corner seat reserved for her in the train. Someone else was sitting in it when the controller came along and indicated it to her. The intruder, of course, took another place, and the French lady sat down already unneces

sarily furious. In the rack above her seat were some traps belonging to another occupant of the carriage. These the Frenchwoman pushed brusquely along the rack, declaring tartly that that place, too, belonged to her. Coming from Italy, I was quite shocked at her unnecessary violence. In no part of Italy could such a thing have happened. Any Italian would have turned round the carriage to find the owner of the offending articles, and would have graciously asked permission to move them, or not finding the owner, would have made a word of apology to the company. A trifle, of course, and also largely a question of

nerves.

Traveling in Italy of course has its drawbacks. Trains are often unbearably over-crowded, and keep anything but regular time. Since the war, owing to the coal shortage and the disrepair of the rolling stock, there are usually only two trains a day to anywhere. Owing to the distances and the gradients, journeys are slow, and it somehow nearly always seems to happen that your train goes at some awful hour like 1.30 A.M. or 4 A.M. People are very patient, perhaps too patient. I have wondered how many English people would travel all night standing up in the corridor, or sitting on their luggage in the corridor of a secondclass carriage, and yet be bright and smiling in the morning. Yet that is a common thing here. To secure a seat in a long distance train, say from Rome to Milan, it is not excessive to arrive at the station an hour and a half or two hours before the train leaves. In fact, it is only prudent.

In the 'thirds' everyone travels with a flask of wine, and in the 'seconds' also there will be a number of travelers so equipped. One replenishes the flask en route, and has the joy of tasting the wines of the different provinces.

Traveling from Rome, say, to Venice, one may sample the wines of half a dozen regions. One begins, let us say, with a flask of white wine from the Alban hills, the ordinary wine of Rome. This is very delicate, and unless the traveler consumes it within an hour or so, the traveling will make it undrinkable. At Orvieto, there is a richer golden wine, done up in small flasks - a noted liquor. If the traveler be so tired or thirsty, that he cannot wait until he gets to Florence, he may sample Chianti at Chiusi, for he is already in Tuscany. If he has been so hasty and anticipated Florence, he must content himself with just a glass of strong Chianti at this stop, because, after all, it is a long way to Bologna, where there is a deep red wine, strong and rather sharp, 'black,' the natives call it. At Ferrara, he may — if it be advisable taste the light rather acid wine of Romagna, while at Padua he will find the wine of Verona. Of course, if he be a disciple of Pussyfoot, there is nothing to prevent him drinking water or lemonade all the way.

Traveling in military trains, or tradotte, is another kind of traveling. Here the soldier leaves all account of time. The trains from Schio, where the Trentino front began, take a week to get down to the boot of Italy. Tradotta travel is altogether a remarkable kind of thing. The trains often pull up in the middle of a field for two, three, or four hours without any apparent reason. If it is daytime, the soldiers get out and roam about the country, sometimes paying a visit to the nearest village if it is not too far away. A bugle sounds vigorously two or three times before the train starts on its journey again, and at this signal one sees the soldiers running across the fields to catch their train. The tradotta often makes these lengthy stops in the middle of the night in order—so the

soldiers say

that the colonel who

It

may

be so.

The New Witness

MR. SHAW DOES HIS BITTEREST*

BY ST. JOHN ERVINE

THERE is much in the new volume of plays by Mr. Shaw which is familiar stuff to those who read him with regularity: the agile, not to say gymnastic, young woman hotly pursuing a mate and an assured income; the sudden introduction of movement, not by development of the theme or the characters, but by setting the people of the play suddenly to squealing at each other or creating a disturbance of some sort; the Englishman so steeped in selfsufficiency that he can never realize that he is in the wrong, and so is invariably in the right; and, most characteristically of all, the impish intru

sion of Mr. Shaw himself on to the stage with the barest pretense that he is a character in the play, very much in the manner in which Fielding intruded into his own novels without even Mr. Shaw's pretense that he was a character in them. The comic Englishman, perhaps, is not quite such good fun when he is Captain Edstaston in Great Catherine as he was when he was Tom Broadbent in John Bull's Other Island, because Mr. Shaw had drawn him more farcically. The fact that the comic Englishman is as mythical a being as the comic Irishman need not trouble us much; all that we demand of him is that he shall be comic; and my complaint against Captain Edstaston is that he is not comic enough.

Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells nor Mr. Galsworthy nor any other modern

*Heartbreak House, and Other Plays. By Bernard Shaw. Constable, 7s. 6d.

school tradition and stiff with good form and stupidity has ever succeeded in exposing him with one quarter of the skill with which he was exposed by Shakespeare. If anyone imagines that he can improve on Marcus Brutus in Julius Cæsar as the prototype of the born muddler and perfect gentleman, I implore him to disabuse his mind of that fallacy as speedily as possible. It was Brutus who, against the pleas of Cassius, insisted that the life of Mark Antony should be spared. It was Brutus, who, disregarding the dissuasions of Cassius, permitted Antony to speak in the forum. It was Brutus, over-ruling the arguments of Cassius, who ordered the march to Philippi!

If Brutus may be taken as a fair representative of the born but gentlemanly fool, Cassius may also be compared to Mr. Shaw in many respects, physical and spiritual:

He reads much;
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men.

The comparison cannot be closely drawn, for Cassius loved no plays and heard no music, and he smiled with considerable difficulty; but it is close enough for our purpose here, and if Cassius feels sometimes that he has lived 'to be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus,' he can comfort himself with the reflection that he was in the fight when Brutus was in the wrong, and that he told him so.

There are six plays in this book, of which five are, as Mr. Shaw himself describes them, bravura pieces. They need not detain us long. The Inca of Perusalem and Augustus Does His Bit are very good fun, even if some of it sounds like a slap in the face. O'Flaherty, V.C., is not quite such good fun as these two are, but it is amusing

enough. Annajanska is very poor fun, and perhaps it is sufficient to say of Great Catherine that whereas the Empress, after reading Tacitus, began to see 'plus de choses en noir,' she would, if she were alive to read this play about her, begin to see red.

The important play is Heartbreak House. It is in three acts, and is described as a ‘Fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes.' The whole of the action takes place in the course of one afternoon and evening, inside six or seven hours, soon after the war began. There is, however, no mention of the war in the play, and the only link between them is the sudden interruption of the conversation in the last act by an air-raid, as a result of which two of the characters are blown to pieces by bombs. One's first impression of this scene is that it is very clumsily contrived, but a second reading of the play removes this impression; for Heartbreak House is less of a play than it is of a parable. The bombs drop as suddenly, and with as little warning on the gifted conversationalists sitting in the dusky garden, as the war burst upon Europe. There we were, all of us, living pleasantly, as Burke begged us to live, and carelessly committing our affairs into the hands of men concerning whose abilities to conduct them we had no certificates and suddenly the ship went on to the rocks, the train ran off the rails, the floor collapsed. 'I'm always expecting something,' says Ellie Dunn, in the last act. 'I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.' And while she and her companions are arguing about the responsibility for the mess in which the world is, bombs drop out of heaven, and life comes to a full stop:

Hector: And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call England?

Captain Shotover: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and

the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?

Hector: Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?

Captain Shotover: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman. Hector: And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?

Captain Shotover: Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.

Heartbreak House, Mr. Shaw writes in his preface, 'is cultured, leisured Europe before the war,' and the play, which is much better than the preface, fits that description very neatly. It is his thirty-first play, and I am near in mind to call it his best play. It certainly is the most bitter and wildly comic piece he has yet composed. When, in due time, it is performed, it will, I am sure, fill the theatre with explosions of laughter as loud as the explosions of the bombs with which the piece concludes. But it will be mad laughter and bitter, self-mocking, torturing laughter. I knew a man who burst into peals of laughter when he saw one of his comrades being blown into the air by a German shell; but

anyone imagines that that man's terrible mirth leaped out of an unkindly heart, they imagine without understanding; for 'even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.' I feel about Heartbreak House exactly as I felt about the man who laughed when his comrade was dismembered: that here is a depth of feeling which cannot be fathomed. Like Job, Mr. Shaw cries out, 'changes and war are against me,' but, unlike Job, he finds no comfort in the end. If men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference.' As for him, he throws up the sponge. Our culture is but the