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"THE FALL OF MAN IS A FACT, THO NOBODY BELIEVES IT" 689

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waned, and changed again and again, and men and women lived up to the local standard or 'disdained it according to their education, their natural bent, or their necessities and temptations. Human nature is still imperfect, is still in progress of evolution and it is still impossible for the mediocre and the weak to act up to the highest ethic of the best developed minds. There is no more mystery in the matter than that."

But the problem may not be as simple as Mr. Blatchford imagines that it is. The New Statesman is impressed by a curious paradox which it asserts as follows: "The Fall of Man is a fact, tho nobody believes it: it happens every day, tho it never happened at all;" and the Nation, in what is perhaps the ablest editorial that has yet appeared on the subject, expresses its conviction that the Fall is one of the realest facts in the world.

The Nation is not particularly impressed by the story in Genesis. It calls the dogma of man living thousands of years ago in a golden age, in communion with the divine, and falling from grace by disobedience to the heavenly will, "theological moonshine." It goes on to say: "If we could transport ourselves in imagination to the scene of this ancient drama, we should as likely as not view Adam-a shambling, hairy man, with prognathous jaws, bent knees, and prominent, overhanging eye-ridges-hiding in a swamp, with his hand over Eve's mouth, while the relatives of her lately murdered husband grunted strangely as they hunted him with lumps of rock." But there is a sense, the Nation continues, in which the Fall of Man is true. It may be rescued from supernatural and authoritarian futility by being explained as the result of the evolution of consciousness. "The beasts are sinless because they know not evil, and the postulate that man reverted to a lower type when first conscious of his powers of choice and recognition between good and evil is hardly an obstacle to faith in the rational order of the universe."

The really important part of this entire question, however, according to the Nation, is not the Fall of Man in the past but the Fall of Man at the present time. It says:

"Canon Barnes would be a romantic person if he attempted to concede this Fall to the optimists. For if civilized man goes on falling

at the mean rate at which he has cbeyed the moral law of gravitation since the opening of the century, he will fall right out of the world, taking with him all the higher animals he butchers for his pleasure or his greed. How, then, can one reconcile this fall with the theory of evolution; in what possible way can we see compatibility between them?

"We can free ourselves in the first place from our provincial way of thinking by surveying not one fall but a hundred falls. It is like modern arrogance to assume that we have a monopoly of falling! The Ammonites fell, the Labyrinthodonts fell, the Saurians fell, Neanderthal man fell, the great Cro-Magnon race fell, the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, the Mussulman, the Spaniard, one after the other, order, race, tribe, empire, all have possessed the earth or a large enough slice of it in their turn, and all have fallen. But life has gone steadily onwards and upwards, climbing over the bones of the vanished and discarded husks that were once the green sheaths of its budding spirit."

The fall of civilized man to-day is probably more disastrous than any past tumble, because the height to which we have risen is correspondingly greater than all previous achievements, and the resultant demand upon us the more urgent. But there are compensations, the Nation reminds us, even in our plight:

"We appear to forget that if Canon Barnes had thrown the Fall of Man to the formalists five hundred years ago (a toddle in the evolutionary journey), he would have been burned at Smithfield, with Mr. Chesterton dancing round the flames. Both theology and science have come through into the century with broken bones but cleared heads and mended hearts, and there is nothing to bind them. And on the negative side, we have repeated and clamant signs (the omens and portents of an older world) that the 'gathering darkness of the frown of God' is not a picturesque phrase, that Christianity is a practical and necessary experiment in government, and that man shall not live by bread alone, or he shall not have even half a loaf. The repudiation of our brutality, greed, and stupidity comes not in whispers but shouts. We are perfectly well aware that evolution is a switchback movement, and that, slowly as it moves, it is not going to be held up because we are fools enough to get in its way. The sovereignty of the earth is only ours so long as we can make our responses, and if we fail to make them, then nobody is to blame for the crash but ourselves."

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"DONOGOO-TONKA" AND "DIE PEST"

WILL THE MOTION-PICTURE CREATE A LITERATURE OF ITS OWN?

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OT only have the "movies" invaded the field of the drama, but they threaten as well to influence literaSoon we may be reading "literary" scenarios as we now read published plays or novels. Future authors may write scenarios and publish them. Louis Delluc, who is critic, director and novelist, looks forward to the time when the "movies" may produce their own H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. No one has yet suggested the advent of an Ibsen of the "movies,' but already two continental authors of distinguished standing have offered "written films" to the French and German public. Jules Romains, creator of the Unanimist school of literature and author of a number of interesting literary experiments, recently published in Paris a "written film," entitled "Donogoo-Tonka" (Nouvelle Revue Francaise). This was a romance of adventures mingled with a satire of present-day life. Almost at 'the same time Walter Hasenclever, one of the most talented of Germany's new Expressionist dramatists, has published in Berlin a scenario entitled "Die Pest." While M. Romains offers "Donogoo-Tonka" rather as a jeu d'esprit than as a serious work of art, Herr Hasenclever, according to continental critics, is a passionate adherent of the new esthetics of the theater and film, and aims at the creation, if we may so call it, of the "art-movie." He is an internationalist, and the film seems to him one of the strongest forces which may bring the people of various nations together and heal the spiritual wounds created by the war.

Paul Colin, who writes an appreciation of Hasenclever's scenario for the Crapouillot of Paris, points out the essential difference between the work of the German and the Frenchman. They are alike in nothing save their basic inspirations:

""The Pest' is a tragic work which is not without a certain philosophic import, and in which the rhythm is, if I dare say so, quite grandiloquent. It is a ghastly revery on the end of the world-but the end of the world which recalls in no way that imagined by Blaise Cendrars and F. Lèger. And tho I do

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not doubt that on the screen the work of Hasenclever might produce a distinct and solid emotion, I have nevertheless some fear about the quality of that emotion.

"The author leaves to the possible director much more liberty than Romains does. He indicates neither the style of the settings nor the costumes. In a single line or two he indicates in the series of pictures each episode, each detail of the scenario. He follows 'his' story, he presents a canvas, a sketch, leaving to others the cares of realization.

"This procedure reinforces perhaps the essentially cinematographic character of the work. Leaving to the mimes and to the specialists the care of getting it 'registered' in the most thoro sense of the word, he permits his 'Pest' to become without the slightest doubt a work created entirely for the pleasure of the eyes-that is to say, its eloquence is uniquely and essentially visual. Hardly ever is a word put in that must be thrown on the screen, only once in a great while. And then it is never a bit of dialog or a spoken remark, but a title, or the explanation of a movement. In 'Donogoo-Tonka,' on the other hand, there is a constant intermingling of text and pantomime. In 'The Pest' action is sovereign."

This "art-scenario," we are told further, is formed of no less than one hundred and fifty-one pictures, divided into a prolog and five acts. All the tableaux are of the utmost brevity. Some of them are so short as to be mere "flashes." Some of them are picturesque to a degree, permitting great settings and large crowds, while others are of a symbolic simplicity. Herr Hasenclever's work is frankly melodramatic, demanding the greatest artistry on the part of the director who would care to mount it. In plot, consciously or not, it bears a close resemblance to the story of our own Edgar Allan Poe, entitled "The Mask of the Red Death," which has often been suggested as the material for a Russian ballet. As recounted by Paul Colin in the Crapouillot:

"The story is simple. In the year 2000 'the world has become like a paradise.' Universal peace and plenty. But the world must perish. First act: the black pest, spread by rats, is discovered aboard a Transatlantic liner, attacking the crew and the passengers of every

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alarm on the Exchange. The evil spreads into the low countries and depopulates the villages. One child alone escapes this horrible death. Third act: the pest continues to spread. A scientist at last discovers a serum. A banker buys from him the rights of exploitation. Revealed to himself by the mysteriously spared child, a student makes himself the apostle of the war against the pest. Fourth act:. The epidemic continues to spread. Everything is stricken. The inventor and his backer continue to work. But an accident happens at the very moment the scientist is about to apply his remedy to the stricken. He infects himself and falls. Insane panic. Fifth act: De serted villages, the last living beings have gone mad. The banker and the dancer escape into a castle where Death awaits them and their guests. The castle is burnt down, and the film ends with an immense dance of the dead."

This effort is significant, concludes Paul Colin, as a first attempt at cinematographic literature. Its imperfections, he thinks, are largely excusable and diminish in no way our interest in the effort it represents. It is less for its actual imaginative value than for its significance and its suggestion that the French writer directs our attention to Hasenclever's work. It will be interesting to watch developments..

A CHILD OF SEVEN IS HAILED AS A
GREAT WRITER

HE enthusiasm lavished on the writings of Daisy Ashford, Hilda Conkling, Horace Wade and other juvenile writers during recent months, reaches its climax in connection with the publication of "The Story of Opal" (Atlantic Monthly Press). This unique diary, which carries as its sub-title, "The Journal of an Understanding Heart," has been running in the Atlantic Monthly, and is vouched for by Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of that publication, as the work of a girl between six and seven years of age. The name of the girl, now grown to womanhood, is Opal Whiteley. She met Lord Grey in Boston last winter, and he has written an introduction for the English edition of the book. M. Clemenceau, M. Poincaré, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Curzon, have all expressed in

terest. The reviewers in England are, if
anything, more appreciative than those in
America. Clement Shorter, in the London
Sphere, goes so far as to say: "I have just
read the most wonderful book concerning
childhood, and written by a child, that has
ever been given to the world. I love 'Pet
Marjorie,' Daisy Ashford's writings, and
all the efforts in which children have en-
deavored to express their limited outlook.
upon life, but not one of them can, in my
judgment, for a moment compare with
this book."

The history of "The Story of Opal," as
Mr. Sedgwick tells it, is very interesting.
It seems that he first met Opal Whiteley
about a year ago.
She called on him at

the Atlantic office with a book which she
had published at her own expense in Los

"THE STORY OF OPAL"

Angeles. It was entitled "The Fairyland Around Us"-the fairyland of beasts and blossoms, butterflies and birds-and she wanted to have it published in regular fashion. There was not very much about it at first sight to tempt a publisher, but "about Opal Whiteley herself," Mr. Sedgwick writes, "there was something to attract the attention even of a man of business-something very young and eager and fluttering, like a bird in a thicket."

Mr. Sedgwick found that the girl had lived in Oregon lumber camps. He was impressed by her recollection of detail, and suggested that she must have kept a diary. "Yes, always," she replied; "I do still." "Then it is not the book I want," said the editor, "but the diary." Whereupon she told him that the diary, kept from her fifth to her eighteenth year had been destroyed. A girl friend in a fit of temper had torn it into thousands of pieces. It was written on scraps of paper of many kinds and sizes. The earlier part of it had been written as a child might write, in capital letters. "Did you keep the pieces of this diary?" Mr. Sedgwick asked; and she admitted that she had kept them all in a box in Los Angeles. But here is Mr. Sedgwick's statement:

"We telegraphed for them, and they came-hundreds, thousands, one might almost say millions of them. Some few were large as a half-sheet of note-paper, more, scarce big enough to hold a letter of the alphabet. The paper was of all shades, sorts, and sizes; butchers' bags pressed and sliced in two, wrapping paper, the backs of envelopes-anything and everything that could hold writing. The early years of the diary are printed in letters so close that, when the sheets are fitted, not another letter can be squeezed in. In later passages the characters are written with childish clumsiness, and later still one sees the gradually forming adult hand."

The entire diary comprizes, about a quarter of a million words, but the published book,

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covering Opal's 'life from six to seven, contains only seventy thousand words. There is "one little mystery about her," as Mr. Shorter puts it, in that she persists that she is not the daughter of Mr. Whiteley, of Oregon, a lumberman, by whom she asserts she was adopted as a child of five. Mr. Whiteley and his relatives (his wife is dead) deny this, and describe Opal's story of her origin as fantasy.

According to Opal, her father was a Frenchman. She speaks of him and his wife as her Angel Parents. Both died, she says, when she was five years old. He is portrayed as a naturalist who was away from home much of the time. Opal makes much of two copy-books which her father and mother left her and which held their photographs. In these books, which told of the world about her and of the older

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Photograph by Bachrach

OPAL WHITELEY AS SHE LOOKS TODAY A picture showing her reconstructing her famous diary.

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