SNAP SHOTS

...Valor, the stirring hand-to-hand conflict—these things celebrated in history no longer have a place, for war today means a hopeless pitting of soft flesh and brain against marvels of mechanism—the machine gun that "spurts out bullets faster than rain can fall," the automaton that "licks its lips hungrily and sweeps from right to left . . . it is pointed on the middle of the body and sprays the whole firing-line with one sweep...

...He wrote his 'Die Maibraut' directly for the needs of the open-air theatre in the Nerothal, a sheltered parklike bit of natural rock and greenery just outside Wiesbaden...

...Literary Notes A STATUE to the memory of Ralph Waldo Emerson has recently been erected in the Concord Public Library...

...A no less striking proof of the present day Appreciation of the Concord philosopher is the large and steadily increasing sale that is reported for the ten volumes of Emerson's recently published Journals...

...there is hardly any department of literary activity in which he has not achieved considerable work...

...There was hardly ever a new movement of any sort in the line of light theatrical fare wedded to real art without von Wolzogen being in the fore...

...Wolzogen acknowledges much of his humor as an inheritance from his English mother...

...To realize graphically what is going on in Germany and Belgium one must read The Human Slaughter-House (Stokes) by Wilhelm Lamszus, a German schoolmaster, whose forecast of what the Kaiser's policy must lead to brought the suppression of his book in Germany after one hundred thousand copies had been sold...

...No Liszt historian will easily avoid von Wolzogen's sketch as a valuable document...

...Pictures play a large part in the telling...

...of old the ragged minstrel, the thing of shreds and patches sang in the marble halls of barons...

...THE PUBLISHERS who are issuing the English edition of World's End by Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy) are carrying on a campaign in newspaper advertising that is unprecedented for the work of an American author in Great Britain...

...No one can read this accurate and frightful story without being convinced of the gigantic stupidity and cumulative horror of modern warfare...

...Into comic opera, too, he branched...

...Wolzogen visited America in 1910...

...Pollard says of Florian Mayr: "There is no better picture of the Abbe Lis and the whole musical circle of that time at Weimar...

...is the universal query, yet, with hostilities just beginning, nearly all lines of communication have been cut and only vague rumors and the tersest dispatches come from the front...

...the victor is the nation that can throw most men into the pit, equip the biggest arm factories, borrow the most money...

...He applied his craft directly to making the art of the theatre pliable to the new conditions...

...The Wonder Book has been written to tell in a simple but interesting way all about locomotives and trains, and how they are run in various lands that children from five to fifteen would be able to understand...

...To go back a few generations, his grandfather was the teacher and guardian of Schiller's children and a friend of Goethe...

...Stories, novels, plays gay and plays tragic have poured from him in an incessant stream...

...WHAT IS happening on the German frontier...

...His undying youthfulness as entertainer was shown again as lately as the summer of 1909 when he wrote specially for the open-air theatre in Wiesbaden his play 'Die Maibraut.' That, in many ways, was his triumphant point of achievement in applying his art to the needs of the immediate...

...He and his son were figures in the classic period of Weimar and Jena...

...It was Wolzogen who first in Europe adapted his art to the new conditions of the natural background and lights...

...War means the bursting of enormous shells over dozens of helpless men, the dropping of dynamite from aeroplanes flying secretly over the enemies' camp by night, the wiping out of whole regiments in thickly mined fields by the pressing of an electric button...

...and there was hardly any form of art which he did not try, as author, composer and actual manager, to apply to the public entertainment of the people...

...It is the work of Daniel Chester French, a friend of Emerson and designer of the Minute Man statue, for which Emerson wrote his famous verses thirty-nine years ago...

...Wolzogen is a member of one of the oldest families in Germany, much to the fore in the history of Teutonic culture...

...The centuries had reversed the figures a little, that was all...

...He has been actor-manager, poet, composer, novelist, militant minstrel and many other things...

...What he attempted in the Darmstadt Plays, for instance, was somewhat different from the music-hall notion of the other minstrels...

...Florian Mayr outranks many better known volumes in that sort...

...I venture to think Florian Mayr Wolzogen's most memorable artistic accomplishment...

...Lamszus in this vivid narrative has brougnt forward a new idea...

...he proves incontestably that changed conditions have made war something it has never been in the past—have robbed it of its only possible defense, its glamour, romance and "manly virtue...

...He has written stories of literary life and of civil life...

...in this Ueber-brettl' day of ours was a baron von Wolzogen singing to such rag-tag and bobtail as might compose a music-hall audience...

...with the novels of George Moore on music...

...But he was never content to play second fiddle or remain subordinately a member of the Ueberbrettl' brotherhood and he branched away from it in many directions of his own...

...Modern inventions have turned the "field of honor" into, the "human slaughter-house...

...This is not conflict—it is mechanical slaughter...

...They both fell in August of this year...

...THE PUBLISHERS evidently had the hundredth anniversary of George Stephenson, the "Father of the Locomotive," in mind when they planned the publication of The Wonder Book of Railways (Stokes...

...Much of what he wrote pertains to the immediate period in which it was created but Florian Mayr (B...

...It has no such abominable blemishes and carelessness as marred the Ather-ton book...

...with Claretie's Brichanteau and with Gertrude Atherton's Tower of Ivory it is properly comparable...

...That the novel has as wide an appeal there as in this country is shown by the fact that it has already gone into a fourth edition...

...He lived in Weimar, Berlin and Munich, and in the latter town the idea of the Ueberbrettl' took him...

...W. Huebsch, New York) is timeless and will survive such books as the one in which he holds up to ridicule the...

...So far as Wolzogen and his accomplishments are concerned we can do no better than quote Masks and Minstrels of New Germany, by the gifted Percival Pollard, whose untimely death deprived us of one of the first American critics to perceive the importance of modern Continental literature: "For sheer versatility no artist of modern times has surpassed von Wolzogen...

...The picture of Weimar is drawn from the inside...

...The breadth and permanence of Emerson's fame is shown by the fact that contributions for this statue came from all parts of the world...

...In the Ueber-brettl' period it was he who literally fulfilled the old troubadour simile, chanting himself, to his own music, upon his own instrument, in a theatre of which, he was manager, songs which he had written himself...

...Herr Lamszus does not attempt to foretell battles and strategy, but describes simply but powerfully the story of one of the millions of German reservists called from their desks and families to be shipped toward carnage on the border as cogs in the Kaiser's mighty war machine...

...new woman" of twenty years ago...