M.P's are pressing for, women to be enrolled in 'L.D.V. One of them, Mrs. Mavis Tate, Member for Frame, writes an amusing letter to "The Times" on the subject: a It is obvious that the civilian woman member Oscar Asche say that the new production is not like the old. But whether the play will please the audiences of today as it did those of 23 years ago depends on that curious and indefinable factor known as the spirit of the times. And all agree that the spirit of this war is totally different from that of the last, Generally, the theatres are having a lean time. More than half of them are closed and revue fills most of those open. Theatrical leaders, Marie Tempest, Irene Vanbrugh, George Robey and others, met at lunch recently and agreed that the theatre was indispensable as a tonic in war time and must be kept going for the public good. But whether the people with money to pay for productions will share that view is another matter.
Another art which needs a stimuli ant is poetry. The Poetry Society which has been reviewing the poems produced by the war says that the general standard is far below that of the last war. There is today no Rupert Brooke, Raymond Asquith, Siegfried Sassoon or Alfred Noyes, It is thought that the mechanized nature of modern war has snuffed out the divine afflatus in a cloud of petrol fumes and superheated lubricating oils.
This explanation is not impressive. One recalls how Kipling scoffed at the idea that steam had killed romance at sea and in many poems it. A better explanation is, perhaps, that all recent poetry (some Philistines would deny it the name) is distinguished chiefly by its artificipality and the sense it gives of being produced by a small eclectic circle which particularly prides itself on its superiority to the ways of common men. Faced with reality in its horridest, most unescapable shape, this type of mind is paralysed. Its little intellectual tricks are utterly inadequate for such a cataclysm and xt has no others.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.