for that term,— time-binders. It is a good term because it clarifies thought and lights up the road like the headlights of an automobile at night.

Sometimes people visit us and ask to see our schoolrooms so that they can decide whether to send their daughters to us. Now our schoolrooms are nothing very fancy, but they are alright. We print a picture of the building we are in on the title page of our Annual Catalogue. It is a good-looking building but we don't occupy all of it. It's right across the street from the Public Library on one side, and from the "CopleyPlaza" on the other, so we feel we are in excellent companyeven aristocratic. But we never should think of selecting our church, or our books, or our friends by the building they might be occupying for the moment. Much less a school for our daughter. We know now that these persons are space-binders. They value education by the square foot. Of course we wish we had a building of our own, and some day we hope to have one, but we wouldn't trade what goes on inside our schoolrooms for any building we know.

Some way or other our students get results and that's the main thing. And sometime the Building will come.

COMMUNITY WORK AND EXPRESSION

Increasing opportunities in community work are opening up before students of Expression all over the country. Cities, towns, and even country communities, through county or Grange initiative, are employing social directors and trained executive secretaries for the promotion and organization of Community drama, pageants, story-telling leagues, junior forums, and similar social and educational activities.

One of our graduates, and a former teacher in the School of Expression, has been for the past year a national organizer for the National Staff of Community Service, Inc., which has been engaged in promoting the development of community activities of this character throughout the country. In the state of Ohio six towns combined and formed a county organization, and this organization built and presented a county pageant, each town providing an episode. Other community groups in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Kentucky, and in Rome, N. Y., gave pageants or organized for permanent community work.

A former student of the School has been for many years a recognized civic leader in her section of the country, addressing

town meetings in behalf of town-planning and better housing conditions, organizing community groups for the promotion of social activities in foreign neighborhoods, opening evening schools for the workers, and organizing neighborhood festivals of folk-dancing and song. Community dramas and pageants, which have their roots in genuine social feeling, must bear fruit in citizenship, and if to this, knowledge is added,—in art.

Graduates of the School of Expression, from their vantage ground as teachers of Expression in universities, colleges, normal and high schools all over the country, are in position not only to co-operate with these community movements, but through knowledge and initiative to promote and organize them,-to become, in short, real factors in the community life. For the work of the School of Expression is both direct and indirect: direct in the training of mind, voice and body for vocal expression in speaking and reading, in dramatic and platform art; indirect in the emphasis placed on "background" and the development of personality.

THE PLYMOUTH PAGEANT

The following description of the Plymouth Pageant by Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn, clipped from "The Nation" of August 24, will be of interest to many of our graduate teachers of Expression, who have been working on the Pilgrim Tercentennial in their classes and communities during the past year. The criticism contains many interesting suggestions for students of the Art of Pageantry.

Coming from the North Shore it was possible to brush aside the intrusions that made Plymouth noisy and ugly and take one's seat at the pageant with a feeling of untroubled sympathy for the men and histories that were here to be symbolized and commemorated. The scene was one of great beauty. The tiers of seats bounded a triangle the base of which was the sea. A replica of the Mayflower was anchored off shore. There were still streaks of orange and red in the west. The place itself and its memories and a quiet contemplation of them was perhaps more impressive than anything that followed. For here the impressiveness was effortless. And there is no doubt that the pageant itself was characterized, primarily, by a gigantic and highly intelligent effort that always hovered on the edge of overcoming the obstacles of its aim and never for more than a moment succeeded. No sooner had the darkness fallen and Mr. M. R. Pevear begun to let his lighting sweep the triangular pageant-field, than one became aware of the simple fact that art needs isolation. Searchlights from the fleet in Plymouth harbor spread their silver fans across the sky and locomotives in the neighborhood barked and clanked. The dark sky was too vast, the breeze blew now in one direction, now in another, and the strains of the orchestra were controlled not by its conductor but by the winds. The trouble is inherent. Nature, too, achieves an isolation parallel to that of art.

The satellites of Jupiter do not drop in on the spectacles she arranges; no Martian storms spoil her effects. Despite the marvelous lighting, despite the misleading analogies of the Greek and medieval theaters, the pageant was, at every other moment, lost somewhere between earth and sky and one strained terribly to hold or recover its unquestionable beauty of significant color and motion. The intrusion of speech and the attempt to create the illusion of indoor scenes-a prison, a ship's cabin-through luminous spots on the dark field completed one's sense of the helplessness of art except upon its proper ground. Now and then, when the wind blew from the right quarter, a voice became articulate. But articulate only. The mere vocal effort made modulation, made any sort of dramatic expressiveness quite impossible. Heavily rhythmed verse might have helped. But the dialogues are written in artificial and rather toneless prose. Structurally the scenes that are to illustrate the progress of the Pilgrim spirit are skilful and intelligent. Their speech is jejune. The interludes in verse were sung and neither Mr. E. A. Robinson nor Mr. Robert Frost can be said to have warmed to the occasion.

What remained, then, was the visibly symbolical. And that was, at many moments, notably beautiful, vivid, impressive. The very first scene, the landing of Thorvald and his Norsemen, had both brightness and remoteness; the figures were both men and memories. The ship, the shields and spears, the scarlet cloak of Thorvald, the dun and stealthy Indians, all combined to form a vision of concrete reality blended with dream-like beauty. Equally effective through the play of softer colors but the rhythm of larger masses was the march of the Dutch cities. The success of these massive and largely rhythmic scenes illustrated at once the limitations and the one possible function of pageantry. That function was most perfectly and, indeed, splendidly exercised in the second scene of the second episode called The Opposition. A royal progress winds > across the field-King James and his nobles and prelates, ambassadors and pages and ladies, soldiers and magistrates. All the pomp and glitter and power of the world appear in solid ranks. The procession stops. Suddenly within the gold and scarlet, yellow and silver, emerges a little, forlorn group in gray. They are the Puritan Petitioners-the outcasts, rebels, revolutionaries whose conscience resists the existing order even to martyrdom and death. There they stand in their one memorable and immortal gesture. A child could grasp the symbolism. The spoken words intruded dully. The scene was great pictorially. It was more than that. It justified to every mind the honor paid to the Pilgrims, the celebration itself, and one's own pilgrimage to Plymouth.

GIFT TO THE ENDOWMENT FUND

The students of the Chicago Summer Term demonstrated their interest and confidence in the School of Expression in a substantial manner by making a present of $1000 to the Endowment Fund of the School. The gift came as a surprise and is much appreciated.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE AND EXPRESSION

The need of a magazine which shall furnish information on story-telling material, modern plays and plays with literary background suitable for amateurs and school dramatics; children's plays, adapted to child audiences as well as to child actors (most children's plays are built for grown-ups); collateral material for public speaking in high schools and colleges; and which will answer the questions which arise in connection with the work of the teacher of Expression in a small town-is becoming daily more apparent at this office. The correspondence on these and similar topics which we are called upon to maintain, and which we gladly maintain, for the benefit of our students and others, has suggested to us the desirability of publishing a magazine which would aim to meet these needs in a far more comprehensive and efficient manner than we, in our busy School office, are able to do.

If this plan commends itself to our readers we shall be very grateful if they will indicate their interest in the particular manner which will make it possible for us to serve them, namely -by filling in and returning to this office the subscription blank below.

(Scissors)

SCHOOL OF EXPRESSION, 301 Pierce Bldg., Copley Sq., Boston, Mass.

I enclose $3.00 for one year of Literature and Expression, a quarterly magazine beginning January, 1922. I am especially interested in the following subjects:

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