a similar competition, won by a beautifully developed boy of fourteen. After that there was no question of objection or prejudice. They all demanded measurements. And it might be said that the newspaper publicity given these proceed ings, with the published photograph of the winner, did not do any harm at all. It is not difficult to see how such a procedure would create an effective interest as far as boys are concerned.

In

fact, the results of such work have been proved most effective, not only for physical betterment, but in character development and in the class-room work itself.

"But how about the girls?" you may well ask. Well, does one really have to answer? What will a school full of modern girls do if they find the boys having some tremendous interest out of which they have been distinctly left? The first thing you know they will demand simi

lar competitions, and, though the performance will be of slower spread, it will spread nevertheless, and be as effective with girls, almost, as with boys.

After all, you see it isn't so hard a problem, and surely if we are going to have medical inspections at all and physical training that really is physical training, it may just as well be so arranged that every individual child receives the full benefit.

T

HE late Lord Northcliffe in his book on "English Newspapers and their Millionaire Owners," which he published shortly before his death, referred to Lady Bathurst, director of the "Morning Post," of London, as "the most powerful woman in England, without exception other than royalty."

This high tribute to the fearless owner of the "Morning Post" is shared by a big newspaper-reading public of England. I have often heard English people commenting on this conservative member of the English press. "I would rather go without my breakfast than be deprived of the 'Morning Post.'"

. Every one admires courage, and this quality, so pronounced in the brilliant director of the "Morning Post," has made her a dominant figure, not only in journalistic circles, but in the political life of England as well.

The "Morning Post" has often taken issue with Lloyd George and other political leaders of the country, and when any Parliamentary action has been taken which it believed was not for the best interests of the country it has editorially said so in no soft terms.

This titled and brilliant newspaper owner, like Lady Rhondda, represents in her success undoubted proof of the ability of daughters of genius to safeguard and direct the great interests handed down to them by illustrious parents.

Lady Rhondda, the world's greatest business woman, a director in more than thirty corporations and companies, inherited these vast interests from her father, the late D. A. Thomas, the Welsh coal operator.

Lady Bathurst took over the control of the "Morning Post" at the death of her father, the late Lord Glenesk.

Lord Northcliffe, in further commenting upon her genius, said: "You may not always agree with her methods and policy, you may not always agree with the enormous headlines, but you will admit that, right or wrong, the 'Morning Post' is bright, consistent, and always English." "Knowing," he said, "the internal organization of the 'Morning Post' for every newspaper knows the

BY HELEN HOFFMAN

COUNTESS BATHURST

internal organization of every other newspaper, just as every army knows the organization of every other armyI know that this paper is produced by the genius of a woman, assisted by just two really capable men. If she were living in America, her name would ring from one end of the Continent to another, and be hurled at Great Britain as a sign of American national superiority."

Always having admired Lord Northcliffe for the honesty of his convictions and the almost superhuman courage

with which he backed them, I felt a great desire to meet this titled and brilliant owner of the "Morning Post."

I wrote to Lady Bathurst, conveying my desire and outlining the questions I was tempted to ask her regarding her ideas of what a great daily newspaper should represent.

A few days later I received her reply by letter, as she had been called away from London at the time.

In brief, she wrote: "My ideas about journalism are so simple and crude that they would be of no interest in this complicated world. They are merely to stand by the right and expose what is wrong. I think papers have much power, but there is much I should like to see corrected. I should like all sensational divorce and other criminal cases cut out and the mere facts that so and so are divorced printed, and the result mentioned as a matter for regret and shame by the guilty party, and no unwholesome details." (A committee of distinguished men are now conferring together in London for the purpose of obtaining this end-that sensational divorce cases shall not be exploited in the newspapers.)

"I should like," Lady Bathurst further wrote, "to see more literature, more wit, more information of a really interesting character, such as scientific matters, garden, farm, painting, music, etc.-less sensationalism. In fact, the ideal would be that a paper should contribute to people's happiness and sanity and not to excite all their worst feelings.

"As for politics, the paper must of necessity reflect the bias of its owner's and editor's minds, but if it is perfectly truthful and sincere it matters not whether it is Conservative, Liberal, or Labor, Republican or Democrat. We all like an opponent we can respect.

"It is the man or the paper that suppresses the truth to serve his own ends and who lies glibly that we cannot tolerate. These are my simple views, and, simple as they are, I believe in them: and, what is more, I know that if you go straight ahead and fear not, on what you believe to be the straight road, it's wonderful what you can achieve."

A

WELL-PREPARED

imagination

is one of the true luxuries of the music lover's existence. The preparation consists largely in the easy adoption of certain indeterminate formulæ, phrased in the lubricated language of the unscientific observer. "The piano is incapable of such expression as the violin attains. The violin is the most expressive of all instruments." Now to one seeking to enjoy violin playing for its own sake it is of no importance to know whether it is more expressive than some other instrument to which one does not happen to be listening at that moment. And long observation of concert-goers has convinced me that a large proportion of them discover the most soul-melting expression in the melancholy wailing caused by the use of the sliding finger on the left hand, a method of heart-breaking singularly neglected by Kreisler and Heifetz.

The sliding of the fingers in passing from one note to another produces a mournful sound much like the crying of a baby, but it destroys the outline of a melody and usually leads to playing out of tune. Therefore let us begin at the beginning. A violin, as almost every one knows, has four strings, tuned to G, D, A, and E, the first tone being below the treble clef and the last in the uppermost space of it. Those four tones are the only ones which can be produced from a violin by simply drawing the bow across the strings. When a player desires to call forth some other note, he must press down some one of those strings with a finger of his left hand, thereby shortening the vibrating part of the string, causing the number of vibrations per second to increase, and thus raising the pitch.

When a violinist holds the instrument with his left hand near the head (the outer extremity where the nuts for tuning are located) and presses down the first finger of the left hand on the E string, he gets an F. The second finger gives G, and the third A, and the fourth B. This group of notes belongs to the "first position," as it is called. If he wishes to go higher than the B, he must shift the first finger to the place previously occupied by the second. The first finger now gives G, the second A, the third B, and the fourth C. This fingering is called the second position.

There are other higher positions on each of the four strings. The violin and other bowed instruments such as the violoncello, therefore, differ radically from the piano in that the justness of the intonation of a melody is dependent

1 An article in this series appeared in last week's Outlook. Other articles in the same series will be printed In later issues.-The Editors.

or cello playing is that the instrument shall be in tune. This includes two elements. First, as the violin is usually accompanied by a piano or orchestra, it should play at precisely the same pitch as the accompaniment. Secondly, it should be in tune with itself, which is to say that, even if it were unaccompanied, as in the case of certain works of Bach every interval must be exact. Playing in a pitch foreign to the piano or orches tra is infrequent. When it occurs, it is probably because the violin itself has not had its four strings properly tuned before the playing began. But playing inaccurate, and therefore discordant, intervals is very common and leads to that kind of sound which caused the famous Mr. Weber (of Weber and Fields) to demand, "Who sang that sour note?"

Unfortunately, bad intonation, as it is called, seems to escape the ear of the general public. Violinists and cellists play out of tune, singers sing out of tune, and whole orchestras are out of tune in their different choirs without disturbing the pleasure of audiences. I have heard celebrated opera artists sing a whole act without more than two or three times being on the same pitch as the orchestra and yet receive as much applause as if they had delivered their music without a flaw. Almost every human being brought up in the conditions surrounding Western life' is fond

of music, but not one in a thousand has a musical ear. So perhaps, after all, it signifies nothing that a few who hear accurately are annoyed by what the majority of mankind does not hear. Erika Morini's occasional false intonation and Mischa Elman's tendency to lachrymose utterance are rewarded with abundant applause.

Since this is a statement of what constitutes good stringed instrument playing, it was the duty of the writer to declare that playing in tune was its fundamental requirement. We may now pass to more subtle matters. The expressive power of the violin and its kind rests in the management of the bow. The use of the bow corresponds to the touch of the pianist. There is telegraphic directness in the communications of the musician's brain to the strings of his instrument. A pianist has to overcome the mechanical intervention of the hammer action, but every shade of the violinist's pressure on the bow is reproduced immediately by the strings. If he stroked them with a gloved hand, he could not be in more direct command of their sensitiveness.

Because of this subtle transference of

1 Long experience with sensitive readers leads us to explain that Mr. Henderson is referring not to the Western States of the Union but to the whole western world, the Occident, including Europe, Boston, and upper Fifth Avenue.The Editors.

the violinist's thought to the strings every player's tone has its own character. This tone is a reflection of the personality of the player. It is quite true that instruments have their own tones. But a good performer can extract from an inferior violin the best tone of which it is capable, while an incompetent one will draw from a Stradivarius only an indifferent quality. Heifetz owes much of his success to the ravishing beauty of his tone. Would you know something of the secret of the infinite variety of shades at the command of the violinist? Watch the wrist of the bow arm. To be sure the entire arm should be absolutely without constriction. It should not be what the athletes call muscle-bound. But the soul of the bowing is in the perfectly flexible wrist. Even the manner of holding the bow with the fingers of the right hand possesses comparatiye insignificance, since different master performers have different ways.

Tone may be large or small. A large tone is advantageous in playing with an orchestra, but it is not essential to beautiful performance. Erika Morini has a big tone, but Erna Rubinstein's is more admired, for it is essential that the tone be pure, mellow, and sonorous. Purity means freedom from scratchiness or twanging, from audible scraping of the hairs of the bow on the strings. It should flow apparently spontaneously, like clear water from a spring. It should always be mellow, which means that it should not be squeaky, or dull and opaque, or hard, as if the strings were of metal. Steel strings are sometimes used, but they should not sound steel-like. The term "sonority" does not mean loudness, but resonant vibration. There is a peculiarly bell-like quality in

a sonorous violin tone, and one should expect it from every good performer.

A beautiful tone, perfect intonation, and free elastic bowing are the prime requisites of good violin playing. Two or three special effects will doubtless attract the attention of what is called "the average" hearer, and he may wish to know something about them. Harmonics are those high, flutelike tones which seem to lie beyond the natural range of the instrument. It was long ago found that by lightly, instead of firmly, touching a string with a finger of the left hand a performer could cause an overtone to be heard while the fundamental tone was silent. Every musical sound consists of a fundamental and several overtones. The untrained 11stener can hear some of these overtones when a big bell rings. The harmonics of the violin and other bowed instruments are overtones, and they can be produced from all four of the strings, each giving a different quality and thus adding to the number of tonal tints at the command of a composer.

Reverting to the bow, the listener may acquire some idea of the elasticity and freedom of the bow arm from noting how the violinist plays staccati-those short detached notes which seem so astonishing when they are sung. A clear, light, firm staccato can be obtained only by good bowing. The position of the bow on the strings affects the tone. Playing close to the bridge gives a thin, nasal tone, often used in orchestral pieces for special effects. Playing a little further away increases the power. But as the bow approaches the finger-board the tone decreases in strength and increases in mellowness. Playing right over the finger-board causes the tone to become veiled and very soft. A different variety

of soft veiled tone is secured by the use of the mute, a little wooden contrivance in appearance like a small comb, pushed down over the strings at the bridge.

All concert-goers who are observant must have seen violin and cello players causing the fingers of the left hand to quiver when pressed on the strings. This produces what is called the vibrato, a swift trembling of the tone, which is believed to be expressive of feeling. It might be so were it not that most performers use it all the time, so that it becomes a mere mannerism. Leopold Auer, teacher of Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist, and other eminent players, is very severe in his censure of this continual employment of what ought to be introduced occasionally and for a manifest purpose. "The vibrato," he says, "is an effect, an embellishment; it can lend a touch of divine pathos to the climax of a phrase or the course of a passage, but only if the player has cultivated a delicate sense of proportion in the use of it."

Excellence in violin or cello playing, like that in all other musical performance, is dependent upon something beyond technic. There must be purity of taste and propriety of style; but such matters do not readily lend themselves to definition. However, the most inexperienced music lover will have no difficulty in perceiving that shallow and showy compositions, such as the concertos of Paganini or Ernst, admit of more ad captandum playing than the dignified and deeply felt creations of Bach or the elegant and finished writings of the Italian classicists. At the bottom of all truly great musical performance there is a certain indescribable, but none the less evident, nobility which always succeeds in making itself

known to those who do not wish to find sensationalism in solo art. For those who do it is safe to say that the best violin playing is always unbearably dull. Excitement is what the unthinking concert-goer desires. He would rather observe the stormy flights of rash Toscha Seidel up and down the fingerboard or the bold attacks of Boris Hambourg on his cello than to be wafted into a celestial dream by the seraphic chanting of some new Sarasate or the organ tones of a Casals. Technically, almost all violin playing is now good. It is in the departments of taste and style that we have to seek for supremity. Many music lovers prefer Elman to Heifetz because, as they put it, he is "more emotional." Well, you have to make your choice. The finest violin playing is certainly emotional, but never sentimental, lachrymose, rude, or unfinished.

While we are considering the playing of bowed instruments, we may give our thought for a moment to the performance of the best of their combinations, the string quartette. All that has been said about tone and intonation applies with equal force to quartette performance. In the department of intonation the requirements are very exacting, for an absolute agreement among four stringed instruments is rare, and yet it is essential to true beauty in quartette achievements. Finish of style in the performance of such an organization is another necessity. To attain it the four performers must play together without the slightest inexactitude of attack or movement, and every phrase must be delivered with flawless smoothness, purity of tone, and justness of accent.

The subject of interpretation cannot be discussed. All that can be made obedient to clearly definable law is the technic of performance. The rules which apply to it are general; those which might be laid down in regard to interpretation would surely have to be equally general, but much fewer. It is difficult to go further in determining the requirements of interpretation than to say that the style should be appropriate. Now style is itself a dubious term, for it is open to more than one construction. We are quite ready to assert that the style appropriate to the performance of one of Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas is not that which should be applied to the Mendelssohn Concerto and that a chamber music organization could hardly be expected to treat a Beethoven quartette as it would that by Debussy.

But these are obvious generalities. An actor does not read the lines of Augustus Thomas as he would those of Shakespeare. But when we have accepted this rather hazy conception of style, we are still confronted with the fact that every composition worthy of study has its own individuality, and that this individuality demands of the interpreter a special style.

Beethoven's "Emperor" piano concerto cannot be played in the same style as his G major concerto. The true artist will of course endeavor to assimilate the art work and reproduce it as nearly as he can in its own spirit. But he can never be any one except himself. When he tries to be, he smothers himself in the wet blankets of tradition. In regard to violin playing there are some very uncomfortable traditions which cramp and fetter the genius of young artists. These are the traditions about

the true school of Tartini, the true school of Bach, and other true schools, of which we know very little and in some cases nothing at all. Here, again, it is a pleasure to quote the great teacher Leopold Auer:

Tradition in reality weighs down the living spirit of the present with the dead formalism of the past. For all these hard and fast ideas regarding the interpretation of the older classic works, their tempi, their nuances, their expression, have become formalisms, because the men whose individuality gave them a living meaning have disappeared. The violinists of to-day are rightly just as individual, each in his own way, as were those of the past. Let them play honestly as they feel they must; let them give us beauty as they-and we-understand it. Let them express themselves, and not fetter their playing with rules that have lost their meaning. Let them not hamper that most precious quality the artist hashis style with the dusty precepts handed down from times gone by. How is a violinist to conceive the meaning of an older work which he may be studying if his own musical instinct, his freedom of conception, are obfuscated by the dictum, "This must be played in such and such a manner because So-and-So played it that way two hundred years ago"?

Therefore in the end we are forced in matters of style to rely largely on innate and sedulously cultivated good taste. The finer the fiber of the artist, the finer will be his style. And for every composition he must have a certain special manner, which the good taste of the hearer will promptly accept as the right one.

"God has blessed us with bountiful crops."-(Extract from any President's Annual Thanksgiving Proclamation.)

HE history-minded reader will easily recall that it was exactly this event of bounteous crops which gave birth to our festal time known as Thanksgiving Day. The proclamation of Governor Carver to our Plymouth colony forefathers had all the fitness of an emergency occasion to call it forth too, since a repetition of the sparse yields of the year before would have marked the end of another “forlorn hope." The Governor's proclamation was, in fact, made to a body of householders supported by a style of farming in which each one gleaned from the soil at first hand the means by which he lived. As technically phrased in the words of modern economics, it was a proclamation to participants in a self-subsisting style of farming, which then prevailed the world over. This was before the great change had taken place which put agriculture upon a commercial basis.

The time-worn words quoted above provoke feelings quite other than those of gratitude, however, to no small part of our National family when made use of in this first quarter of the twentieth century. It is, indeed, to the modern farmer an exact case of using old skins for new wine. By him farming is no longer looked to as a direct source of living to his household, but is regarded as the means of making money profits the same as is the case with any other industrial pursuit. Farming is now to only a slight extent a self-subsisting industry. It purveys to the market for its rewards and is affected by all the hazards of an ill-mated demand and supply of products.

The main crops of this year—as were those of last year, and the year beforepromise to be of the bumper sort. The official crop report from the Department of Agriculture shows for this year maximum yields for corn, cotton, hay and oats. Wheat is higher in yield than the average for five-year crop periods, as are also the potato, the apple, and the tobacco crops. From this teeming embarrassment of riches there is but singularly little of joy among farmers. Α Congressional commission of inquiry into the causes of agricultural depression has just issued a report of seven volumes upon the subject. An emer gency conference upon the farmer's needs was called by President Harding at the beginning of the present year, and Secretary Wallace declares that the present state of farming in this country is the worst in all history.

OF A

BY WILBUR O. HEDRICK

The farmers' disgust with bumper crops comes from the fact that they over-supply the demand; therefore they always sell for less money than do normal crops or, even at times, scant ones. A random selection of the big crops of staple sorts during the past decade shows this plainly-the sixteen-millionbale cotton crop in 1914 sold for $56,000,000; and the three billion-bushel corn crop in 1920, for $2,208,000,000. On the other hand, the average returns per annum for the preceding five years for each of these crops equaled, for cotton, $79,200,000; and for corn, $3,150,000,000, respectively. In his annual report for 1921 Secretary Wallace confirms the truthfulness of this outcome by the statement, "A large crop brings the farmer fewer total dollars than a small one."

The human demand for the products of our farms is fairly fixed and inelastic. Dr. Pearl, the statistician of the Hoover Food Control, in a recent book entitled "The Nation's Food" shows that during a seven-year period (1911-18) this demand amounted annually to 129,931,314 millions of calories. No other nation in the world consumes so much. There is little room, therefore, for expansion in the American appetitie. Indeed, subtle food distributers or middlemen have devised many other uses for food than that of mere nourishment. It is widely used, for example, as a method of hospitality: it gives social distinction, and it has curative qualities. Pushing middlemen have made food more attractive for all these purposes by processing the raw material into novelties of all sorts, by packaging it, and by the almost unlimited use of advertising. Schools of domestic science everywhere have also done their best in making food more attractive to the consumer, and therefore creating a bigger outlet for the farmer's crops than he had previously enjoyed.

Farm fecundity, however, under favor able conditions, can easily overflow all these channels of outgo and resolve itself into a simple case of an over-supply of food. Dr. Pearl shows that during the years shown above the yield of these farms was per annum in excess of 144, 636,152 million calories, a clear surplus of more than 4 per cent beyond the amount demanded. The money effects of this fatal variance between demand and supply may be seen from the claim made by our Secretary of Agriculture that the crop of 1921, though huge, returned to the farmers $7,000,000,000 less than during the previous year, and for 1922 $4,000,000,000 less than for the preceding year. It may be said further that the crop of this year promises no variation from this rule.

It is plainly to be seen from the fore

going that city people and farmers do not see the matter of crops and food as eye to eye. To the farmer the bumper crops which have been so much the theme of joyous newspaper headlines and editorials during the present autumn bring little else than grief. A new agitation for crop restriction, or for farmers' strikes, of which we heard so much two years ago, will probably be the reaction. Indeed, the displacement of the old self-subsistence style of farming by the commercial type has been so recently and so swiftly done that phrases and ideas upon the subject have not changed with equal speed. The rapid shift of the bulk of our people, too, from the country to the city which has taken place has also obscured clear thinking upon the relations between town and country. Some popular slogans, for instance, with regard to this greatest of pursuits are clearly city-made and are coming to have more and more an exclusive city acceptance.

One of these deifies the merits of "bumper crops." A second choruses the worth of a "back to the country" movement. Here, indeed, is a fine panacea for demobilizing the city. People will remove to the country, so the theory runs, and thenceforth feed themselves. and thus leave a larger food supply for those who remain in the city. The intelligent farmer's reaction to this proposal is the same, however, as is that of the steamship company when it hears that its rival is to put a new fleet of ships on the route. Why should the farmer always be the victim of back to the country movements, colonizing of soldiers schemes, and new homestead legislation on our dry or swamp lands? The flour-mill industry has never been debilitated by gifts of free mills from the Government, as the farming pursuit was by the gifts of free homesteads a few decades ago.

The stressing of intensive farming. which seems to be the press fashion of the day in treating of farming, has little of support among farmers. The thesis here, in brief, is that the intensive is the better style of farming, because it gives bigger yields per acre than are now the rule among us. Our farming, in fact, is so notorious for the low yields per acre which are got from the fields, as compared with those of other countries, that it has been called a system of "soil skimming" or "soil butchering." Our farmer is dull to these criticisms, however, since he knows that large yields per acre are costly in labor and fertilizer expense. Land, on the other hand, is abundant with us, so he prefers to get his crops from the use of much land rather than from the costly