Theatre of Max Reinhardt, especially as the nature and significance, and indeed the very presence of these conceptions and principles, have been almost entirely overlooked by the reviewers in the English press. The work of the reformers of the advanced school may be said to be based on the general assumption that great emotions are continuous and unending. For instance, love, in essence, is the same to-day as it always has been and ever will be. If such emotions are set free from intellectual checks they provoke corresponding emotions in any spectator. Hence three conceptions have arisen: 1. Drama. Is the unconscious element, that is, emotional reality, manifesting itself in motion. 2. The Drama. Is the essential form which secures the flow of Drama. 3. Representation and Interpretation. Are parts of the essential form. Therefore the drama itself. 4. The Theatre. Is a part of the essential form. Therefore the theatre is the drama itself. Hence have arisen certain fundamental laws or principles governing the application of the said ideas: 1. The spirit of drama is not founded upon literary ideas, but upon emotions reaching far into the past and future. 2. A play is of no dramatic value unless it expresses, continues, secures and provokes the eternal dramatic spirit. 3. A play that contains the eternal dramatic spirit is of no particular period. Therefore the business of the producer is not to represent a play of this description in an old and ready-made form, but to extract its dramatic spirit and create the form most essential to the expression of that spirit. (This is the office of the creative producer till the creative dramatist arrives.) 4. But as the interpretation of the big predominant emotion of a play is beyond the power of one individual, it must be interpreted by a group of individuals who will collaborate in order to carry out one predominating emotion which they feel in common. This is ensemble production. 5. Acting has no relation to a play unless it transmits the dramatic spirit contained in the play. 6. The predominant emotion to be expressed must not be confined to any single leading player but must extend from him or her to every member of the group of players and from them to each member of the vastest crowd. This is ensemble interpretation. 7. Likewise the predominant emotion must not be confined to the acting but must extend to the costumes, scenery, accessories and music. This is ensemble representation. 8. Finally the predominant emotion must be carried from the stage into the auditorium. All the objects and agents surrounding the spectator must be harmonized for the purpose. From this it will be gathered that the laws or principles evolved are those of unity and intimacy. LONDON Popular Adjectives HUNTLY CARTER [TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM] DEAR SIR,-There has been a good deal of excitement in England recently over the use of the word "bloody" on the stage. "Bloody" is probably the most popular word in the country; it is heard in the highways and the byways; no one can escape it. Yet its repetition on the stage is unpardonable! Why? I have noticed several attempts over here to explain the word as a corruption of "By Our Lady "-" By'r'lady "-and so, "Bloody." Will the ingenious providers of elaborated derivations kindly explain the origin of the word "bleeding," which is almost universal in London as a substitute for "bloody"? NEW YORK WILLIAM UDDIE Drastic Punishment [TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM] DEAR SIR,-The New York Globe, which has been doing such excellent work in repairing the deficiencies of our so-called health authorities, reported recently that Judge Collins, presiding in special sessions with the associate judges McInerney and Kernochan, characterized the actions of restaurant and lunch-room keepers who sell food prepared from questionable supplies as mean and contemptible, and worthy of the most drastic punishment within the court's power to mete out. One such offender was the Clinton Lunch Company, 916 Ninth Avenue, New York, which pleaded guilty to the charge of having rotten meat in its possession and paid a fine of $50. A fine is not sufficient in such cases. The offenders should be compelled to exhibit prominently in the windows of their establishments a notice of the conviction, so that the public may know the record of the place, and express its disapproval by strict avoidance. Time deals too lightly with such abominable offenders. It is necessary to make the way of transgressors particularly hard, when the offence is so utterly mean and contemptible. NEW YORK W. J. HENDERSON EDITORIAL NOTES Battle, Murder and Sudden Death O war has come at last, and day by day the armies march and clash, and great ships go to their doom, and there S° are Te Deums for the victorious and Misereres for the vanquished. And men pay the price. They pay it in physical pain that cannot be realized: in ghastliness unparalleled. Faces are sliced off: limbs are blown to dust: bodies are disembowelled: shrieking masses of agony litter the battlefields: the dead alone are untortured. This is the glory of war. God damn all war. In the great cities, crowds wait for news. They are elated or depressed as the bulletins come in, and the lying rumors, and the incessant contradictory dispatches. Their hearts are with the armies and the fleets of their country: they dream of triumph, or duty, or revenge. And word comes that 30,000 men have been killed in a single battle. This is the glory of war. And women pay the price. They pay it in the long agonies of suspense and of dread: in fear confirmed, and the desolation of those who shall hear no more in life the voice of husband, or son or brother. They pay it in deprivation or actual starvation, now and in the years to come: in sacrifice, and heavy labor in the fields, and stunted lives, and the enduring memory of sorrows. God damn all war. great Throughout the world, commerce and trade are hampered or destroyed. The rich are made paupers, and the poor yet poorer. Factories close down: mills are stopped. The hordes of the unemployed tramp through the cities. Women become prostitutes: men become thieves. This is the glory of war. And children pay the price. They pay it in privation and neglect: in the loss of the necessaries that mean life or health: in a shadowed childhood, and undeveloped gifts, and lost opportunities: in minds dwarfed or weighed down by early labor, or early responsibility, or the long sombreness of clouded homes. God damn all war. There is no excuse for war, no need for war, no purpose for war. In the world to-day, all civilized nations can live together in amity, with a place in the sun for every one of them, and a helping hand from each to all in time of passing need. But the appeal to war remains because there are still in every nation ignorant, blatant, conceited fools who affirm the necessity and glory of war: because there are still in every nation men-wellmeaning men who preserve the old suspicions, and the old stupidities, and will not recognize that a new religion, bigger than Christianity as it has been interpreted by the churches, bigger than paganism as it has been interpreted by the mobs, is knocking at the doors of the world, and will find those doors opened wide by the men and the women who have been waiting. We will have no armies in the future, but police only: no armaments, no militarism: no bullying of nation by nation: no legacies of hatred from defeat, or of contempt from victory. We will have no diplomacy of the old type, which vaunts itself upon outwitting its competitors. We will have statesmanship of the new type: the statesmanship of service, not of selfishness. No man shall take pride in a triumph over his brother, no nation shall be mean enough to traduce or trick another. A dream? God's mercy, no! Is not the first natural thought of each nation to send sympathy and practical help to another in any time of sudden catastrophe, such as earthquake, or mine disaster, or calamitous flood? In war, men gloat over the tribulations of their enemies, who yesterday were their friends. It is the change from sanity to drunkenness. Shall the nations again be drunk with the war frenzy? Will any man stand out, and praise the slaughter-house, and the offal, and the reek of blood? There has too long been carelessness, and shallow thinking, and hypocrisy, or the world would have at least one man who would come forward now, and be heard through the roar of all the cannon: a man whose word would be obeyed by all the warlords and dictators and cabinets: a man mightier than mobs, or militarism, or autocracy, because the whole force of the organized public opinion of the world would give authority to his proclamation: Let there be peace. War-and Peace IN the first week of the war, Great Britain and Germany each voted war credits of more than $1,000,000,000. These enormous amounts were merely for the preliminary expenses: the full bill has yet to be presented and paid. It has never yet occurred to any nation to appropriate $1,000,000,000 for the purposes of peace. The United States may well lead the way. The President has already saved us $1,000,000,000 by his handling of the Mexican difficulty. Cannot we be as patriotic in peace as other nations in the time of war? It would be a memorable act—and it is entirely a possible act—for Congress to appropriate that vast sum now, to be devoted, gladly and ungrudgingly, to such measures of enduring value to our national life as the President and an advisory committee shall determine. We owe much to President Wilson. It would be a fitting recognition of the high regard in which the nation holds him, if he should be empowered to spend, in the name of the Prince of Peace, the thousand millions that he withheld, undaunted by invective, from the God of Battles. No man would have had a more wonderful tribute paid to him. No man better deserves it. And no nation would have done a more wonderful thing for itself and all humanity, than the nation which first held that the price of peace was worth at least the initial cost of a ruin ous war. Providence IN the usual interesting way, all the nations of Europe have been calling upon Providence to rally to their support and take sides in their respective quarrels. If Providence has any special preference for the slaughter of Germans and Austrians by Frenchmen and Russians, rather than for the slaughter of |