I

Keyhole Journalism

F a newspaper slanders an individual, redress can be had under the law of libel. But if the same newspaper pries into some personal affair which may be proved true, but concerning which publicity is sure to be painful, the injury inflicted may be deeper, while redress is difficult—usually impossible to secure.

When a person occupies a position of trust or influence, broad social interest may justify any inquiry based on the desire to get at facts bearing on the individual's relation to the public. Men and women so placed must inevitably face open and direct observation and discussion. But with private persons it is a different matter. And the fact that a thing has happened does not make it the public's business.

A baby was born in New York recently to a woman who for three years had been a widow-a wealthy woman, long active in sociological affairs. She had not wished to remarry, but had desired a child. She chose a man who she believed would give her child a good physical and mental heritage, considered her own position, and confided in a few relatives and chosen friends. Her story ought to have stopped there, but one of the people she trusted blabbed it. The New York "World" got word of it; and, although its editors knew that the mother did not desire publicity, a reporter went to her room in the hospital and insisted on questioning her. That reporter's suggestive account of the whole matter-including thoughtfully the fact that both the mother and an aunt had pleaded to have it kept out of print-appeared on the front page.

Some time ago another New York woman-foolishly, without doubt-gave out word of her engagement to a member of the English peerage. The New York "Times" doubted the announcement and, for some reason, followed it up by inquiries in London, which showed that no such nobleman was known. That news appeared in top-column headlines that gave it entirely false importance.

What purpose do such reports serve that justifies the humiliation they cause and the snickering curiosity they satisfy?

The New York "Times" prides itself on the motto: "All the news that's fit to print." But that formula, evidently, is not sufficiently comprehensive to cover all the news considered worthy of its dignified-looking pages.

The New York "World" has a record for crusading in idealistic causes. Its editorial columns are informed with the spirit of desire for truth and justice and a fine sense of fair play. But its news columns sometimes show the touch of a different hand that makes them a sad contrast of unscrupulous journalism.

In this instance we are not concerned with the right or wrong of the mother's decision. What concerns us is the indubitable wrong of the newspaper's action. The "World" struck callously at the mother and child. For the sake of a cheap sensation, it exposed them both to the glare of the street and the gossip of gawpers.

To protect individuals from the Peeping Toms of the press who make them a helpless show for the crowd is becoming a

grave issue in America. Nobody expects anything else of the tabloids. But when supposedly reputable newspapers disregard the responsibilities their power brings them and use it to exploit individuals who cannot defend themselves, they do more than inflict personal injury-they bring into disrepute the public service of journalism.

The Job of Being Married

T

HEY tell us that "the institution of marriage is in a bad way." Theological sanctions are losing their grip. The changing economic status of women is playing hob with old ideas of dependence. The automobile is making us a race of nomads. Psychology has evolved new definitions of spiritual liberty. And so we are asked to view with alarm the state of marriage. We might share the worries of the alarmists if the principle of marriage were an invention of mankind. Fortunately, it is nothing of the sort. The essential element of marriage is as fundamentally instinctive in mankind as the desire for food or the hunger for an understanding of the mystery of the created world,

Many of our troubles (personal and social) come from thinking of marriage as static instead of dynamic. People talk glibly of the institution of marriage, as though all marriages could be classed under a single head, and as though there were two separate races of mankind, the married and the single. Young people have been taught to look forward to marriage as a magic formula which would change the nature of their beings.

As a matter of fact, to say that there are as many varieties of marriages as there are men and women is a gross understatement, for every marriage is in a constant state of flux and development, progress or retrogression. It is not the same thing today that it was yesterday, nor will it ever be again the same thing tomorrow. Successful marriages represent a development in the general direction of understanding, unity, and social responsibility. They represent a progress sometimes tragically halting, sometimes miraculously swift, towards the greatest growth of which the contracting spirits are capable.

The willingness to bear responsibility and the hunger for such unity and understanding in a universe where single souls confront the immeasurable loneliness of the stars is so allpowerful that the fundamentals of the marriage relation will remain as uncontrollable by theologians, reformers, and psychologists as were the waves of the ocean by the kingly command of Canute.

Half the battle for a successful marriage is won by those who can grasp the idea of permanent purpose in the midst of perpetual and bewildering flux. The romance of the reality of marriage is so satisfying an adventure that those who have experienced it have no need or desire to substitute for it the tinseled romance of the old story books which ended "and they lived happily ever after." Chopping the tale off at that point is like stopping a movie when the names of the pro ducers, photographers, costumers, and scenario writers have been flashed upon the screen.

T

HERE is a man in this country

who is new to the ways of Americans. In the land of his ancestry it is a wise and profitable thing to own a piece of land, to cultivate it, to increase his crops and cattle, and so support his family. This man found that in the land of opportunity farming was not quite so simple. He had saved, and he had managed to secure for himself a small farm; but the ground was stubborn to deal with, rocky and unyielding.

The rocky ground (though there was so much of it), the strange markets, his wife and growing family to feed and buy clothes for it was all too great a problem for a simple mind. Plainly enough, he reasoned, one should have business experience in order to get ahead in this feverish country.

Failure piled up on this man. When the burden became too great, it had to be dropped. The farm must be sold, the house, the cattle, the rocks, the fieldsall must go. With his little family his wife that was so good a mother, his three children, who must wait a while now before he could afford the country air again he would move to New York; he would find in that great city the opportunity for business training that somehow he must acquire if he were to live.

The city was terrifying. It was full of everything except space. Still, in small, cramped rooms they could manage to live at least so long as it took to build their fortune. She could keep house anywhere, that woman, and the children would be well cared for; meanwhile, he would look for his work.

The first day-the second day-the third day-the first week was gone. The second week, it would be better; he would know his way about. The third week-it was not so much a big job he was looking for, if perhaps there were some small piece of work that would let him buy food for a few days. A month went by.

Then a very strange thing happened. This city, that had paid so little attention to them, apparently had known they were there all along. After a day spent looking for work, the man went home to find a man in uniform arguing with his wife. The children were frightened, the youngest crying. This was no place for his wife, it seemed. The place for her was under lock and key. The jail was

By IBBY HALL

ready and waiting for such people. But what had she done? Why was the city so upset about his wife?

It seemed they wanted his wife in that county where farming had been so difficult. Those cows now, that were sold with the rest of the cattle; four of them had died. It was plain to be seen by the neighbor who had purchased them that his wife had poisoned those cows. Did the husband want to go bail for his wife? No; there was no money for bail. There was nothing. There was not even any longer any one to look after the children. Why did they think that his wife would poison cows-the cows that were their living? And what did the city want him to do now? With no wife to look after the children, no money, and no work?

This rocky country, these neighbors, this screaming city-this was a foreign land.

THE strange inward struggles of chil

dren rarely rise to the surface, and still more farely reach the news. But recently there was the story of the little girl in Connecticut who broke into a rich little girl's playhouse (the rich little girl having gone to the city) and kept house there with great success until she was discovered by the overseer.

A little boy over in Long Island didn't need to read that newspaper story. On his way home from school one day the little boy stood and gazed at a shack in a deserted lot. He stood half-way between school and home, and school was filled with smarting memories. He was in trouble. He had misbehaved, and he was under explicit commands to tell his father all about it. School was behind him, and home, with terrifying possibilities, was ahead. He chose the shack. The horrors of bachelor housekeeping were unknown to him, but day by day he met them bravely. The weather was cold, and turned colder. With each desperate day and every lonely night, home looked more beautiful and desirable; but he stuck it out. Until the catastrophe. Perhaps he had been learning to cook, perhaps he was trying to warm himself, but in a few minutes he was rushing desperately to the fire-engine house. His shack was in a blaze. His two weeks' shelter from the world was gone. Excitement the fire-engine-a crowd

HERE was a man who served his em

ployer day after day and year after year. It was probably his pride that he served so faithfully-it was certainly his boast that he had never been late. Not once, in years of service, had he ever been late! Perhaps he had not risen very high in life; perhaps his ambitions had been larger than to be a jeweler's clerk, but he could hold his head high over this. He was an honest man. He never cheated his employer of a minute.

The employer of the clerk approached him one day quite genially. Here was an idea. A jeweler needs publicityjust like an actress or a five-cent cigar. Now take Christmas. Christmas is a good time to pull off a stunt-fake robbery jeweler held up-maybe a bobbed-haired vamp in it-and the papers advertising you on the front page!

A jeweler's clerk can probably remember the problem of his employer's honesty for a year. At that it might have been a joke, for nothing really happened. Christmas came and went, and trade was no better than other Christmases.

The jeweler's clerk put in another year of faithful service-another year. and not one morning late. Not even the morning of last December when the newspapers became so excited and shouted right out on the front page how one more jeweler had been robbed! A girl bandit-pretty-and coaxing him to let her in on a Sunday when he just happened to be in the shop looking things over. And an accomplice that stuck a gun in the jeweler's ribs-and the haul- It was terrible!

The jeweler's clerk reported at the police station-one year ago had his em ployer suggested to him!! He had threat even now, when this was printed, ened to fire his clerk if he should give him away to the police.

The employer was invited to court where he turned his strange imaginative eye upon the clerk, meditating his death blow. He launched it coolly under the eyes of the police. "Nonsense!" sai the jeweler. "I threatened to fire hi because he was always late."

I

T was James Gibbons Huneker, the greatest critic and writer on things musical this country has yet brought forth, that seized upon the phrase "il faut cultiver notre jardin" from Voltaire's "Candide" and wittily applied it to the one and only Mary Garden.

However, if New York was unable to take Mr. Huneker's advice, Chicago had anticipated it, as it was one of the all too few visits of the Chicago Opera Company to the island of Manhattan that inspired that brilliant critic to write the series of articles on the art of Mary Garden, now included in his volume entitled "Bedouins." Not only did the city by the lake anticipate the advice referred to, but has followed it faithfully, and now Mary Garden is the bright particular star of that very vital organization, the Chicago Civic Opera Company.

This young organization, after many ups and downs of management and direction, one of the most brilliant seasons of all having been under the direction of Mary Garden herself, seems to have at last settled down into a thoroughly going concern. It has each year a season of approximately five months, three of which are devoted to Chicago itself and the other two to a vast tour from coast to coast, the longest stop being the two weeks in Boston, to say nothing of several one-night stands. The net result is that cities that in former days rarely ever heard an opera now have their one, two, or three performances a year by an organization of the very first rank which has on its roster such world-renowned artists as Mary Garden, Rosa Raisa, Fernand Ansseau, and Vanni Marcoux. The plans for a splendid new Opera House are now completed, and, if all goes well, the Chicago Civic Opera Com

By EUGENE BONNER

but in addition is supported by music of a high order. In "Sappho" she hasn't a particularly good acting part, and the music, like so much of Massenet, is negligible. Even in Paris at the Opéra Comique, done by Marthe Chenal, the opera was frankly a bore. Mary Garden has changed all that!

From the moment of her riotous entrance, dressed in a superbly outlandish costume of mauve, orange, and black, in the very festive scene which opens the opera, to her pathetic exit in the closing scene at the little house at Ville d'Avray, she holds one. Costumed in the fashion of twenty-five years ago, with bright red playing the most important part in the color scheme, a mop of red hair done into a knot on the nape of her neck, she makes a bizarre and at times almost sinister effect. The power of the scene at Ville d'Avray, where she turns on her old friends, thinking they have willfully betrayed her to her lover, the pathos of the scene with Jean's mother, and the quiet dignity of her final farewell to him as he lies asleep, elevated the tawdry and insignificant little opera for the time being into a masterpiece.

Miss Garden, who, by the way, seems to improve vocally each year, was splendidly supported by Fernand Ansseau as Jean. Mr. Ansseau, who is a star of the Paris Opéra and of La Monnaie in Brussels, has a beautiful voice, is young and a fine actor besides. Why is it the Metropolitan can never find French tenors? (In this case it's a Belgian, but no matter.) The opera made no particular demands on the directing ability of Charles Lauwers, who conducted in place of Giorgio Polacco, who had been announced on the program, but was indisposed.

USIC lovers of this country have

for so long associated what they persist in calling "grand opera" with battle, murder, daggers, and cold pizen. that they have almost got to the stage where a light subject, no matter how skillfully handled, if given on one of our few great lyric stages, seems to them almost like laughing in church or making

a noise in a bank. It was all the more

delightful, therefore, to see that old

favorite "Die Fledermaus" of Johann Strauss, beautifully mounted and gloriously sung in English by singers of the very first order.

Charles Hackett, well known to Metropolitan audiences, was the husband and played and sang as if he were enjoying every minute of the proceedings. Rosa Raisa, that superb Russian, sang and acted brilliantly the part of the deceived and deceiving wife, Rosalinde, though her splendid voice seemed at times a little heavy for the light character of the music; she was ably aided and abetted by Irene Pavloska in the part of the maid. Giacomo Rimini was delightful as the friend who, in order to revenge himself on the husband (who had once compelled him to promenade the streets in broad daylight after a masked ball in the costume of a bat), precipitated all the complications.

The rôles of the jail warden, the Russian nobleman, and the tenor were expertly handled by Chase Boromeo, José Mojica, and Forrest Lamont, respectively, while Virgilio Lazzari as the turnkey of the jail was excruciatingly funny in that low-comedy part. The ballet which appeared in the second act, in the "Blue Danube Waltz," and, of course, proceeded to bring down the house, added materially to the success of the operetta, which was ably conducted by Henry G. Weber.

IT

T was seeing the famous French actress Berthe Bady in the play of "Resurrection," after the story by Tolstoy, somewhere in the late nineties, that fired Franco Alfano, who was then living in Paris, to write an opera on that subject. While originally produced in Italy a good while ago, it made no very great success until year before last, when Mary Garden, who had dropped in casually to see a performance of it one eve ning at Monte Carlo a few months before and immediately recognized in it a vehicle for her genius, appeared in it in Chicago and subsequently on tour in this country.

Last autumn it was produced at the Opéra Comique in Paris, where it had a really astonishing success, due princi pally to Miss Garden's powerful and