mune from her fascination. After a long philosophical discussion between the men about the value of the document, Helen offers it to the young girl, Christina, the lover of Janek; and because her lover is dead she takes it and without a word burns it slowly in the flame of a candle. Thus ends the idea of longevity. Shaw's play carries us as far as the Shavian mind can reach—the Vortex and the Whirlpool in Pure Intelligence. Capek's play leaves us imprisoned within our flesh—his mind can only reach out to the ideal of the Mother and Child. But it is a provocative and stimulating play and is sure to create some discussion when it is produced this winter.
Karel Capek is also the dramaturge of the Vinohrady Theatre. This theatre, the home of the intellectual drama in Prague, with an annual expenditure of four million crowns (one hundred thousand dollars) has just been able to obtain a fairly substantial subsidy from the municipality and the State to the tune of five hundred thousand crowns (about twelve thousand dollars). I mention this economic fact because it explains how a theatre with a box-office can dispense with that modern horror, the box-office play. The winter season repertoire ranges through the drama from Aristophanes right up to Knut Hamsun: on the way we meet the names of Racine, Molière, de Musset, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Byron, Goldoni, Goethe, Pushkin, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Björnson. Surely a sufficiently hearty meal for the most hardened. But the Czechs have the stomachs of peasants and the digestion of a horse.
I don't know whether you celebrated the Shelley Centenary in your country. In England a very unostentatious meeting took place at which the Italian Ambassador gave a speech in English and I believe that Sir Rennell Rodd spoke in the language of Dante (I may have got it all mixed). However it has been left to the Czechs to do the right thing. Without any great fuss they have produced his five-act poetic tragedy, The Cenci, a drama that has only been played once in England, and then only privately (as I write this, news comes from England that the Censor has just lifted the hundred-year ban).
Painting
Last May eleven young Czech painters held their first public exhibition. All of them with one or two exceptions are in their early twenties. The exhibition was retrospective, showing work done as
