One knows well enough, alas, how the temptation to spiritual drug-taking
has grown as the result of the accumulated sorrows of these past years,
but it is not well that such a treatment of the eternal question should
be taken seriously. Is this sort of thing really better than the
harp-and-cloud theory? It is not. One looked in vain for any trace of
real vision, any true sense of the height and depth of the problem.

Mr. MARSHALL struggled quite manfully with the part of _Anthony_, and of
course he had his moments. I hope so good a player is not developing the
"actor's pause," of which I detected signs. Miss IRENE ROOKE had nothing
in particular to do and did it very well. Mr. HUBERT HARBEN as the
impenitent profiteer from Lancashire, _Anthony's_ brother-in-law, was
better suited than I have seen him for some time, and provided the very
necessary relief. The precocious children infuriated me, but that is
purely temperamental. The actors who played the parts of those who had
"crossed" were wrapped in such an atmosphere of gloom, to the strains of
such meretricious music that (on the evidence) I can only advise people
to defer their crossing as long as possible; a thing they will doubtless
do, even if they have a friendlier feeling to the new religion than I
can command.... I am afraid I proved a bad sailor.

T.

* * * * *

TWO STUDIES IN MUSICAL CRITICISM.

(_With grateful acknowledgments to "The Times" and "The Morning
Post."_)

I.

We had quite a hectic time at the Philharmonic--I nearly wrote the
Phillemonade--concert last night, what with two Czechs, Dabcik and
Ploffskin, slabs of WAGNER, and Carl Walbrook's Humorous Variations,
"The Quangle Wangle," conducted by Carl himself. If the honest truth be
told, we sat down to the Variations with no more pleasurable
anticipation than one sits down with in the dentist's chair, preparatory
to the application of gags, electric drills and other instruments of
odontological torture. (Strange, by the way, that no modernist has
translated the horrors of the modern Tusculum into terms of sound and
fury!) But we were most agreeably surprised to find ourselves following
every one of the forty-nine Variations with breathless interest. Mr.
Walbrook is indeed a case of the deformed transformed. We found hardly a
trace of the poluphloisboisterous pomposity with which he used to
camouflage his dearth of ideas. His main theme is shapely and sinuous,