IN

The Great Lilliputian Terror

the new Fall edition of Mr. Ziegfeld's "Follies" there would seem to be a news story of magnificent proportions. It is surprising that the press-department has not already caught its possibilities. We refer to what was apparently the Great Lilliputian Terror in Russia a few years ago. The fact that no word of it had reached America before only shows how little real news has come out of that country since the war.

In this new edition there is what is billed as "Celebrated Russian Troupe of Lilliputians of Mr. Ratoucheff." Before the performance of a very dull pantomime, Mr. Ratoucheff himself (who adds up to about two feet six inches in good heavy woolen socks) comes before the curtain and makes a speech in which he craves the indulgence of the audience because his troupe does not spik English. Your indulgence in this respect is not heavily taxed, however, as they work entirely in pantomime anyway. It really is gratuitous in Mr. Ratoucheff to give away their secret, unless it is that he wants to make sure that you understand that these are no mere local Lilliputians out on a lark.

BUT

UT the big punch in Mr. Ratoucheff's speech does not lie here. In the course of his explanation as to why his celebrated troupe finds itself on these over-hospitable shores, he lets drop, with characteristic Russian casualness, the fact that they were driven out of their native land by the "present unhappy situation." Of all the monstrous things that have been laid at the door of the Bolshevik government, nothing has shaped up quite so gigantic in Machiavellian devilry as this deliberate rout of Mr. Ratoucheff's celebrated troupe of Lilliputians.

WHAT

a night that must have been in Red Russia! One can almost visualize it, even without more details from the plucky Mr. Ratoucheff. Lenin, at the height of his strength and power, consulting with his lieutenants under the walls of the Kremlin in the icy moonlight of the Russian night. He whispers nervously, for he is about to undertake a coup on which hangs the success or failure of the Red Régime. "Men," he says, "to-night Soviet Russia meets her test. To-night we drive Mr. Ratoucheff's celebrated troupe of Lilliputians out of the country or we

ourselves go under. A bas les Lilliputians! They constitute the sole remaining menace to the Red government."

And then begins the memorable scene on the Nevskii Prospekt, the fighting Lilliputians, led by Mr. Ratoucheff, gamely struggling against tremendous odds until finally, charged by the Soviet horsemen, they give up the unequal fight and book passage on the Berengaria. The red hordes had won, but in Mr. Ratoucheff's breast there still flames the spirit of Romanoff Russia, and as he stands there on his tiny pedestal in the excessively uninspired pantomime entitled "Story of the Paris Night," he registers all the emotions, from grief and anger to German measles, with an intensity and fervor which must make the spirit of Lenin, wherever it is, wince at the futility of his attempt to stamp out the dauntless fire of the Ratoucheffs.

!

INCIDENTALLY, we will gladly serve on a committee

of five to draw up plans whereby the quota on Lilliputian actors can be reduced to practically nothing. Failing to restrict the quota, if the Ku Klux Klan will include thespian midgets in their list of undesirables we will promise to take out a two-weeks' guest card in the order. We could do an awful lot in two weeks.

As for the rest of Mr. Ziegfeld's new edition, we must

admit that, compared with his "bull-dog edition" which was on the streets last June, it is a very pleasant show. Nothing startling, but pleasant. Lupino Lane seems funnier than he did at first and Miss Pennington, while disclosing nothing in the way of talent that wasn't disclosed several seasons ago, still manages to hold her own, which is cminently satisfactory. We have already gone on record concerning Will Rogers, who could carry along a much worse show than the "Follies" all by himself.

As a special added attraction, Mitty and Tillio, the dancers, have been brought in. They are all right, but it would seem that one thing that our revues do not need at the present moment is another pair of naked dancers who hurl themselves at each other in rhythmic wrestling and cxit with the gentleman carrying the lady high above his head. This Bernarr Macfadden school of dancing has its points, but sometimes we long for the old days when Mrs. Castle used to come out with all her clothes on and do a waltz. Robert Benchley

It looks now as if loneliness were one of the prime ingredients of the wellbeing of the agriculturist.

And if it is a choice between intellectual starvation for the farmer and actual physical starvation for us city folks, there is no question but that the farmer must be intellectually starved. This is severe, but so are a lot of other things.

It is certain that farming has gone to the dogs in recent years. The farmers will be the first to admit this. In fact, they have been the first to admit it. The blame for this condition has been laid on all three political parties, on Wall Street, on the Catholic Church, on the Jews, on the Negroes, on the white folks, on the Ku Klux Klan, on Europe, and on the weather.

But let us look deeper.

Let us go right to the heart of the matter and examine the farmer himself. Has there been any change in him in the last few years?

hours he used to keep. To put it bluntly, he has been sitting up late. He has been dissipating at the radio.

Instead of going to bed with the poultry and getting up at the crack of dawn, the farmer has been staying up like a chorus girl, trying to get Los

Somehow or other we must restore the farmers' normal bedtime hour. One way is to sound a national radio rural curfew about eight o'clock every night and get the farmers to promise to go to bed then. The other is to take the bull by the horns and remove all radio sets from farmhouses. This is probably what we shall have to do.

A third way would be to stop all broadcasting. This wouldn't be so bad. Don Herold.

Standing in Line

IF the population continues to increase,

and standing in line remains fashionable, we predict that in 1950 we shall: Stand in line to get up in the morn

ing.

Stand in line to blow our noses.
Stand in line to sniff rain in the air.
Stand in line to sneeze.
Stand in line to slap mosquitoes.
Stand in line to hear the clock strike.
Stand in line to look at the stars.
Stand in line to fall in love.

Unrecorded Retort

dance orchestra at Chicago, on his radio, and next day the farm animals get their breakfast about noon, and ploughing begins when the sun is high in the heavens. I would not be sur

gry look," remarked Julius Cæsar. "I've lost a lot of sleep lately," explained Cassius, "sitting up to watch my calories."

Yes, indeed, there has.

Life and Letters

IF

a psychoanalyst, testing me for instantaneous reactions, said "Robert Hichens," I should respond, "I hope to God a lion bit her!" and thereby give him a little real work to do. For that is the awful fate which Arthur Guiterman wished on the heroine of "Bella Donna" at the end of his rhymed review in this magazine some years ago, and it is one of the few things I am never going to forget. An alternative response would of course be "Africa," which is where all Hichens characters go in the end, whether they are good or bad. They must, to give Mr. Hichens a whack at the scenery, which he does up, it is granted, very well. His latest novel, "After the Verdict" (Doran), deals with a young pair's struggle in London to live down a trial for murder which the husband had undergone while yet a bachelor. I wasn't half as interested in that as I was in whether or not and why, if so, Clive really had poisoned Mrs. Sabine, but Mr. Hichens holds out on us with that until the very end. Clive and Vivien give it up finally and, to get away from it all, go to Africa, where the first person they meet is the lawyer for the defense in a slander suit arising from the murder case, and where the English consul in the town they pick is a cousin of Mrs. Sabine. Marcus Aurelius was rightthe world is a small place, after all.

"PEOPLE YOU KNOW,"

by Young Boswell (Boni & Liveright), is the very book to read when you are depressed or have made up your mind definitely that the sleeping powder is not going to work. It consists of brief and interesting conversations between the author and one hundred contemporary celebrities, so that we get not only a splendid assortment of ideas but a frequent

change of subject. Young Boswell has caught the exact spirit of his famous prototype. He submerges himself and is impressed, thereby heightening the effect of his portraits. Most modern interviewers, I hear, feel like slapping their victims, and what they write usually sounds like it.

How

OW different the tone of George Moore's "Conversations in Ebury Street" (Boni & Liveright)! Here are talks which Mr. Moore has had with Walter de la Mare, Granville-Barker, Edmund Gosse, Cunninghame Graham and others, and to state that they are one-sided is putting it mildly. I am reminded of some one else's wonder that a man can still be alive who invariably gives himself so much the better of it in printed conversations. It would be so natural for the other halves of the sketches to club together and kill him. Mr. Moore's runnings

along are full of meat, but the reader must have a well-filled salt shaker close at hand.

"THE

HE kind of thing you read in a book" has lost its meaning lately because our novels have taken to running too much the way of life itself to afford the reader escape from reality. But now Ethel Watts Mumford steps forward with "The Wedding Song" (Doubleday, Page), which is full of the kind of thing we used to read in books. For example, in the opening chapters the heroine receives a pearl necklace worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a man whom she knows but slightly. Also an offer of marriage, which she accepts. Pretty soon we are all down in the South Seas with the Pearl King, his bride and her wicked brother who has planned the whole thing just so they (Continued on page 36)