of Our Village into
a lovely texture with a design that even a Philistine world can
understand.

"Young, new American playwrights first," says Mrs. Lewis. "After that
as many great plays of all kinds as we can find. But we want to open
the channel for expression. We want to give the Village a voice."

And when she says the Village she does not mean just the section
technically known as Greenwich. She means--I take it--that greater
neighbourhood of the world, which is fervently concerned in the new
and thrilling and wonderful and untrammelled things of life. They have
no place to sing, out in the every-day world, but in the Village they
are going to be heard.

And I think the new Greenwich Village Theatre is going to be one of
their most resonant mouthpieces!

A LAST WORD

And after all this,--what of the Village? Just what is it?

"In my experience," said the writing man of sententious sayings,
"there have been a dozen 'villages.' The Village changes are like the
waves of the sea!"

Interrogated further, he mentioned various phases which Greenwich had
known. The studio-and-poverty Bohemian epoch, the labour and anarchy era,
the futurist fad, the "free love" cult, the Bohemian-and-masquerade-ball
period, the psychoanalysis craze; the tea-shop epidemic, the
arts-and-crafts obsession, the play-acting mania; and other violent and
more or less transient enthusiasms which had possessed the Village during
the years he had lived there. Not wholly transient, he admitted.
Something of each and all of them had remained--had stuck--as he
expressed it. The Village assimilates ideas with miraculous speed; it
gobbles them up, gets strong and well on the diet, and asks for more. It
is so eager for novelty and new ideals and new view-points that if
nothing entirely virgin comes along, it will take something quite old,
and give it a new twist and adopt it with Village-like ardour.

Oh, you mustn't laugh at the Village, you wise uptowners,--or if you
laugh it must be very, very gently and kindly, as you laugh at
children; and rather reverently, too, in the knowledge that in lots of
essentials the children know ever so much more than you do!

It is true that changes do come over the Village like the waves of the
sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic
waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their
crests iridescent seaweed and glittering shells and now and then a
pearl. T