one with the blue flowers and the cupids. And then I've got to see about the wash." With that Emilie was off.

The ribbon was quickly procured, and with the impatience of a woman with a grievance Fräulein Emilie hastened to the laundry. In a small enclosure behind hedges, the linen was hanging placidly from the ropes. A woman in a strange blue costume was taking the dry pieces from the line, and inserting the clothes-pins with careless abandon between her teeth. She walked into the house with the full basket and returned a moment later with another. Then it suddenly came over the stupefied Emilie that the strangely apparelled being was not a woman at all. Herr Willi Che Foo, student of theology, had found employment.

Fräulein Emilie fainted. Then she went into hysterics; and ended at last by collapsing very snugly and comfortably in the arms of the first passer-byHerr Hilfsbibliothekar Schmidt.

Hermann Hagedorn, Jr.

FAIRY RINGS.

He rose when the world was all asleep;
Only the crickets tuned their viols,
And far away and low and deep

The sea rolled in on the rocky isles.

Across the meadow, beyond the mere,
In the pailid light of the early day,
Half in ecstasy, half in fear,

Light-footed he sped through the dusk away.

And there on the bank of the singing rill,

Where the fields and the little woods join hands,
And the white mists hang along the hill,
He chanced upon the fairy bands;

All in a diamond dewdropped ring,
Underneath a stout old oak,

He saw them dance, and heard them sing
The mystic song of the Little Folk.

And then in the sunlight back again

When the fairies vanished at morning glow

To tell the dull sarcastic men

Who could not understand or know:

"I saw them tread their elfin maze,

Round about and in and through,

Till they fled with the night from my wondering gaze."
And they said, "He is mad," but he knew, he knew.
C. T. Ryder.

SHAWISM.

Mr. Arnold Daly's production of Candida has been a great boon to the play-discussing public. Not only has it furnished conversation for innumerable dinners and teas, but it has even more noticeably supplied copy to a large number of critics, amateur and professional. And the curious thing about it all is that everybody has been able to give it his own very plausible but entirely individual interpretation. Candida is best of all Mr. Shaw's plays suited to such treatment; for the characters are apparently just enough filled in to reflect the mood of each hearer. And the lack of a theory as to the play's meaning is evidence only of one's lack of inventive genius. But still more noticeable is the fact that those who are better acquainted with Mr. Shaw's other plays show no greater unanimity. The only point of similarity is that they all load him up with significances and philosophies.

Weighty terms have been used in praise of Mr. Shaw's work. He has been called Ibsen with a sense of humor; he is "revolting against the common ideals of humanity" a "vein of true optimism, strong and magnetic," runs through his work; and so on. He is even assigned a neatly-labelled philosophy. All of this seems very ridiculous if one reads the plays without peering around for a significance. Mr. Daly, in the New York Globe, himself has cleared the atmosphere in regard to such treatment.

"I am sure that Shaw's comedies and other plays that they call 'literary,' would succeed, if they were rescued from special matinees, special casts, and the mental loafers that like to pose and prate about them. Put them on like any other plays at regular performances by a regular company. Don't try to be superior. Just use common sense. Tell the public that they are going to see an amusing play-a good deal more entertaining than the 'productions' in which you can't find the play and the actors for the scenery. Then have the patience to wait for the audiences to see it for themselves, and tell of it. That's all. Once I thought I could form a society of actors to give Shaw for his own sake, but it did n't work. A company hired like any other and acting

like any other, did. In that way we really gave Shaw a chance. The mental loafers and the superior persons had scared intelligent people away. They were so busy hunting for Shaw's meanings that they would n't let you see his cleverness and brilliance, as though cleverness and brilliance took three days to puzzle out. They loaded him up with morals, as though he were Ibsen himself, with his northern heaviness."

Bernard Shaw is an Irishman. This is more important than might appear; for it implies a number of qualities in his work which his admirers seem to lack-among others a dominating and sympathetic sense of humor. Another implication is less obvious, but even more characteristically Irish. It may perhaps best be phrased by saying that he writes largely for the fun of exercising his wits, for the fun of writing and not to carry home some gigantic moral import. That he considers such exercise very pleasant at any rate is evident from one of his prefaces; speaking of the time when he wrote reviews-"if ever there was a man without a grievance, that man was I;" and later, "Too weak to work, I wrote books and plays." To these two factors in his make-up much of Mr. Shaw's eccentricity and much of his seriousness (where that slips in) may be traced.

A sense of humor does not mean merely the ability to see a joke, or even the ability to make one. It includes those rare arts, but it goes further. It involves seeing the follies and paradoxes of a system of life which has come to be accepted as ideal. Mr. Shaw's first play attempted exactly that office. Widower's Houses was produced in 1892. It pointed out the fact that many "respectable" people get wealthy on the rents of crowded tenements, that many others live on mortgages on the same sort of property, and that conditions are such that no one of the parties can well avoid these unpleasant circumstances. Now all this is very true, but it was by no means a startling revolution even in 1892. Its value lay not in its revelations of the slum-problem, but in the manner in which it advertised them. Though the play achieved no financial success, it accomplished its purpose to some degree by stirring up such a hubbub of comment as Candida has produced this year.

Mrs. Warren's Profession is similar. It simply points out a defect in the present constitution of society. It is something in the nature of a "plain talk." It presents the fact that women of Mrs. Warren's class are practically forced to take up her profession. The truth of this very few people who know much about it are prepared to deny; and none but clergymen and reformers pretend that the evil can be removed by exhortation to the people concerned. Mr. Shaw merely announces a fact that any man who can look over the edge of his own church pew will admit. And as in Widower's Houses he proposes no solution: he makes it plain that Mrs. Warren would neither grace nor enjoy her daughter's life.

A solution is proposed elsewhere, however. Mr. Shaw apparently delights in writing elaborate prefaces to all his plays, nominally explaining their meaning. On these prefaces is based, I think, much of the tendency to discover meanings in the plays. That they are inadequate bases it is not hard to convince oneself. In the first place it is difficult to take seriously an essay that begins with the title "Mainly About Myself." He then goes on to repeat his accusations of the accepted social ideals, cooly throwing little bombshells into various self-satisfied traditions, and thrusting right and left with delightful impartiality at almost everything English. A more effectual scattering of dust without much real digging it would be hard to find. And it is still more difficult to accept seriously the remedy which he proposes-namely Socialism. It is not the usual brand of that creed. It is, to be sure, based on the belief that every man has a right to a living and asserts that he ought to be "allowed" to earn it. But it is not a very practicable sort of reform. In fact it is almost entirely destructive. Only compare it with the German style of socialism and it appears very slight. Where Mr. Shaw writes a novel and laughs at the world's follies, the German writes a tremendous disquisition on the rights of man and the inevitable, logical, irrefutable results of these postulated rights. Mr. Shaw could no more be a sober Socialist than he could be Teutonic in his wit or metaphysical in his thinking. observes the follies in our society. pokes fun.

His socialism is that of a man who He proposes no revolution; he merely