for
Europe to learn now: it ought to be put in the reading-books of every
tongue.

What struck me about the Czech performance of "Coriolanus" was the
dignity of personality and height of conception which the Slavs bring
to the interpretation of Shakespeare. It was the same in Moscow in the
old days. Hamlet was more interestingly conceived and better performed
than anywhere else in the world.

An interesting play reflecting in itself the world-drama, was lately
produced at Prague under the title "R.U.R.," or "Rasum's Universal
Rabots." A scientist named Dr. Rasum succeeded in inventing a human
automaton, a human being except for the fact that it had no soul and no
power of reproducing itself. They were excellent for use in factories
and in armies, and the firm of Rasum, Ltd., supplied them in hundreds
and thousands to companies and States. Eventually the Rabots, as they
are called, combine and make war against the real people with the
souls, and they destroy Dr. Rasum and his factory, and even the plan
and the secret whereby the Rabots are made. They also destroy the real
people, all but one, and a great sadness comes upon the world as it is
realized that man must die out. At the end of the play, however, a
soul is born in one of the Rabots, and he is touched to love, and so he
obtains the power to reproduce the species, and the human story
recommences. A striking idea for a drama, and capable of arousing much
excitement in Labour's literary circles. I heard that the rights had
been bought for almost every country of Europe. In the drama, as in
music and art, the Slavs are always passing Teuton and Latin, backward
though they may be in other matters.

Enough has been said to register the opinion that the new State of
Bohemia is very promising, and that it is a redeeming case in the
welter of New Europe. As far as Prague is concerned it leaves behind
its provincial recent-past, recovers its ancient-past, and looks
towards a great future. New buildings will arise worthy of a capital,
new administrative offices and a new Parliament House are to be built.
Around the Parliament House it is designed to place the cycle of
Mucha's mystical paintings lately exhibited in New York. These
traverse the whole story of the Slavs, and especially that of the
Czechs, but not, however, omitting the story of Russia, from the
baptism of Vladimir to the emancipation of the serfs. Czecho-Slovakia
will raise the banner of a n