College News, 1937-05-05, Vol. 23, No. 24

              ^The
News
\
VOL. XXIII, No. 24
BRYN MAWR AND WAYNE, PA., WEDNESDAY, MAY 5,  1937
Copyright TRUSTEES  OF
BRYN   MAWR   COLLEGE,   1937
PRICE 10 CENTS
Socialism  Assum_,
Economic Aspect
In   Great  Britain
Marxist Philosophy Not Easily
Assimilated   by   Solid
Middle Class
WORKER  IS   RESIGNED
TO MODEST AMBITIONS
Goodhart Hall, May 3.�One per-
son's interpretation of the philosophy
of the British workman, says Mrs.
Barbara Wootton, must necessarily
include generalizations that are both
superficial and misleading. The phi-
losophy differs widely in political out-
look and temperament, but the British
working class itself is united for
three reasons: because it is British,
because it works for weekly wages,
and because the wages are limited.
The workman's philosophy, as such,
is the same the whole industrial world
over. It is one of resignation, of not
expecting much from life, and it is
tempered in Great Britain by only
slight expectation of escape. The
worker expects to be a worker all his
life, never a captain of industry, or
even a participant in the stock mar-
ket. Escape for him is pure chance,
perhaps as the winner in a football
pool or a racing sweepstake.
Also in common with other coun-
tries is his potential envy of more
fortunate economic classes, not flam-
ing envy, but a potential response to
appeals. All working classes have
at some time expressed their resent-
ment at the unevenness of distribu-
tion. In reality, their ambitions are
modest; with a secure income of five
pounds a week their castles-in-the-
air will be realized. Nevertheless,
they display characteristic outbursts
of mass emotion; all classes could
participate in an event like George
V's funeral. The coronation, how-
ever, will not be attended by typical
British people, because of the price of
tickets, about a week's earning for
low-paid workers. The typical peo-
ple attend the dress rehearsal and
make themselves useful by accustom-
ing the royal horses to cheering.
Another aspect of the British work-
man^ philosophy is his desire for
'severity. Workers will forego the
opportunity of rising if they can
stay where they are, and pathetically
great sacrifices are made by par"efits
for the education of their children.
For the women, security does not
mean freedom. The typical working
class housewife is a slave; to her "a
good husband" means one who hands
over the housekeeping money regu-
larly on Friday, does not habitually
get drunk, and stays home occasionally
Continued on Page Six______
COLLEGE CALENDAR
Thursday, May 6.�Lecture
by John Mason Brown. Good-
hart, 8.30.
Friday, May 7.�Beginning
of Nucleus Camera Club Ex-
hibit in Common Room.
Freshman dance. Wyndham,
9 p. m.
Saturday, May 8. � Maids'
play.   Goodhart, 8.20.
Sunday, May 9.�Lecture by
Mr. Ellis Ballard on Kipling.
Monday, May 10.�Interna-
tional Club meeting. Common
Room, 4.30.
Sixth Shaw lecture by Mrs.
Barbara Wootton. Goodhart,
8.20.
Tuesday, May 11.�Current
Events.   Common Room, 7.30.
German Movies of the Olym-
pics.    Goodhart, 8.15.    .�,.     �
Thursday, May IS.�Concours
Oratoire.    Common Room, 4.30.
Friday, May 14.�Last day of
classes.
Sunday, May 16.�Dr. John
W. Suter, Jr., will conduct the
out-of-door service in the Dean-
ery garden at 7.30.
Lehigh   Delegates   Visit
Philosophy   Club   Here
D. Stevens and L. Steinhardt Read
Papers to Group
(Especially contributed by Augusta
Arnold, '38.)
About thirty representatives of the
Lehigh University Robert W. Blake
Society visited Bryn Mawr Friday
afternoon, April 30. The visit was
arranged with the help of Mrs. Theo-
dore De Laguna and members of the
Bryn Mawr Philosophy Club.
Philosophy Club delegates took the
Lehigh group about the campus. Mr.
Harry Helson gave an informative
demonstration on/the effect of light
on surface color and the contours of
the sound-waves in human voices.
After the tour of the campus there
was "a Philosophy Club meeting and
tea at which Mr. Dean Stevenson, of
Lehigh, the president of the Blake
Society, read a paper on Philosophy
and Art. His approach to the subject
was historical, and he used numerous
examples to illustrate his points.
Leigh Steinhardt, '37, answered him
with another paper on the same topic,
but her approach was purely philo-
sophical. The discussion which fol-
lowed was animated and broke up only
when time came for dimfSr.
The Lehigh delegates were enter-
tained by the Philosophy Club 'and
their guests at dinner in the 'Deanery,
after which Mr. Donald MacKinnon
gave a lecture on Phantasy d\d Per-
sonality.                                    ^
Puppet Celebrities Sing and Act Rhymes;
Explorers, Animals, Literati Represented
The Deanery, May 2� TJhe Yale
Puppeteers presented explorers, celeb-
rities, a queen and many animals, ac-
companied by Ogden Nashian rhymes
set to music. Flush appeared and
cocked both spaniel ears in a burst
of melodrama to the tune of The Read
to Mandalay. He was followed by
subterranian armored fishes singing
with delight:
"And Beebe
Is coming to tea       -^
To tea."
Queen Victoria, in a scene not writ-
ten by Laurence Rousman, is shown
in heaven.
The puppets are all made by the
three puppeteers and were presented
in separate scenes. Mr. Ibbity Brown
writes all the words and tunes and
has published a book, Punch'e Prog-
ress (Macmillan) describing the pup-
peteers' ten years' experience. All
three�Mr. Sibbity Burnett and Mr.
Sabbaty Bnu.� _-v tba^uft***'!'
sing occasional choruses, give some
speeches�and went to Yale.
In the first scene two musicians per-
formed a piano duet, complete with
dramatic gestures and trills, on minia-
ture white pianos. Most of the stage
pieces   were   white   and   showed   up
sharply against the black drop. Lit-
tle spot lights fixed on the figures
were dimmed and changed at appro-
priate moments. The characters�
among them Mrs. Martin Johnson,
Walter Hampden and Katherine Cor-
nell, Rear Admiral Byrd and Gert-
rude Stein�were amusingly intro-
duced by Mr. Brown, and their ex-
ploits and peculiarities taken off in
his verses.
Cleopatra, not the queen but "a
sort of Fanny Brice of a horse," ar-
rayed in a beaded gown, swinging red
skirt and diamond hoofs, exhibited the
night life of Cairo, niinois�with
dance and song. That "rocking chair
racketeer," Mr. Alexander Woolcott,
on the other hand, is merely "sittin' in
Sutton Place knittin' � (literally, too)
and weaving the "gossamer fabrics of
Woolcottiana."
Clowns twirled to The Merry Widow
Waltz on a little white and blue see-
saw, and ended triumphantly in a
double handstand. This last was exe-
cuted cautiously and laboriously, with
a reality that was a masterpiece oi
string-pulling.
The puppeteers finally shed light
on Admiral Byrd's mysterious lone
Continued on Pas* fmv
President Park crowns Lucy Huxley Kimbcrhj,   :57,
Queen of the May     ,             ,
Kittredge Discusses
Shakespeare's Villains
t                        ���
Intellectual Hatred in Edmund
Contrasted With Diabolic
Passion in Iago
EVIL   IS   AARON'S   GOOD
Petrified Forest Given
By Cap and Bells Club
'Haverford   and   Bryn   Mawr   Cast
Share Honors in Play
Goodhart, April 29.�"I trust you
will find the subject congenial," said
Mr. George Lyman Kittredge as he
began the Ann Elizabeth Sheble
Memorial Lecture on Shakespeare's
VUlains; After this introduction to
hiVfirst visit to Bryn Mawr, he im-
mediately entered into a detailed dis-
cussion of the villains, quoting ex-
tensivelyNfrom the texts of the plays.
Aaron in Ttt1M~Andronicus was in
love with villainy, said Mr. Kittredge.
Crime^was his element, and his creed,
like Satan's, was "evil be thou my
good." The fact that he was born
under Saturn meajij much to our an-
cestors who puti great faith in
astrology. Aaroa's one redeeming
feature was his/ love for his baby,
whose lullaby, *said Mr. Kittredge,
"Marlowe couldn't have written."
If there had been no Aaron there
would be no Othello. Similarly, the
character of Iago had a direct influ-
ence on the development of Edmund
in King Lear. .Both had legitimate
motives for resentment, but Iago's
hatred is passionate, diabolical,
whereas Edmund's love for crime is
calmly intellectual, bearing neither
hatred nor malice. When Coleridge
called Iago's malignity "motiveless"
he was wrong, for the villain had two
passionate motives: a sense of in-
justice, to which he merely alludes;
and suspicion of Othello, fostered by
jealousy and based on rumor, to
which he refers in his soliloquies.
Edmund, Unlike Iago, Is dispassion-
ate. He has no hatred for his vic-
tims. He has, however, a valid case,
being wronged first by the law of
primogeniture which cut him, a
youngest son, from any inheritance,
and secondly by society's distinction
between a "natural" and a "legiti-
mate" son. A natural son, he says in
the true Elizabethan manner, should
get natural rights.
Iago, too, is wronged when Cassio
is promoted over his head. Before
that he had done nothing villainous.
He used Roderigo for sport, to be
sure, but that was not bad form in
Shakespeare's time. Resentment, not
-murder, is therefore justified. At
first he has no thought 'of murder.
He is merely trying to use his oppor-
tunity to get Cassio's place, to worry
Othello, and perhaps even to win
Desdemona. In other words he is a
typical army officer in Elizabethan
drama and life.
Don John, the bastard  brother in
Much Ado About Nothing, is not as
clever as Iago or Edmund.    He is a
"genius  of  brooding  moroseness,"  a
Continued oir I^o'r�. "    �"T
Haverford, April 30.�Even exclud-
ing the fact that The Petrified Forest
has an unusual number of male parts,
it is not hard to understand why The
Cap and Bells Club chose it for their
spiing performance. True to Sher-
wood tradition, the play evolves from
the chance gathering of a cross-section
of humanity, motivated by some com-
mon, external source of tension. This
provides almost every member of the
cast with an important and individual
part.
In particular, T. Simmon's old
grandpa, T. Watkin's amorous, gum-
ohewing football star, and R. Aucott's
cherubic Jackie were exceptionally
well played. Margaret Otis, '39, and
Sam Withers as the discontented
Chisolms, C. Baum as Herb, Ellen
Matteson, '40, as the Mexican cook,
and linesmen, gangsters and legion-
naires, while they may have erred on
the side of over-acting, were all dis-
tinct personalities, rigid parts of a
complicated counter-point of character
and diction.
There are, none the less, certain
difficulties involved in an amateur pro-
duction of^this play> the fact that al-
most every member of the audience
had seen either the Broadway or movie
version and that practically no acting
and a great many technical problems
occur during the course of its two acts.
These were handled with notable sue
cess. While the personality of Leslie
Howard almost completely dominated
the Broadway production, the script
does not necessarily call for this in-
terpretation. The play belongs to
Gabby as well, and VTrginia Lautz,
'39, showed this throughout her per-
formance. A paradoxical character
reflecting the drabnesS of a filling sta-
tion and the poetry of Francois Vil-
lon, she seemed to deserve Alan's sac-
rifice; she was naive, direct and genu-
ine as well as romantic. This two-
sided personality must have been hard
Continues on Pace Five
Lantern Elections
The following freshmen have
been elected to the Lantern:
Vrylena Olney, '40, and Mary
Kate Wheeler, '40.
Senior Reading Period
Mrs. Manning has asked the
News to print the following
statement about the proposed
senior reading period:
The Faculty at its meet-
ing last week considered the
petition of the senior class
for a reading period be-
tween May 10 and May 14.
It was decided that in view
of the difficulties of prepar-
ation in this, the first year
of the final examination in
the major subject, the cuts
taken by seniors after Tues-
day, May 11, would .not be
Sftunte*-in, their attendance
' record, and also the depart-
ments should be asked to
lighten the assignments of
new material in advanced
courses so as to give the
seniors more free time in
the last week of classes.
Dewilda Naramore
Will be Next Year's
Hinchman   Scholar
Little   May   Day   is   Occasion
For "Intelligent Rowdiness"
As Usual
LUCY    KIMBERLY,    '37,
CROWNED MAY QUEEN
This year's May Day, which broke
with gradually mounting brilliance
on the morning of the 30 of April,
was again the occasion for what Miss
Park termed an "Intelligent rowdi-
ness." But like the day itself, this-
attitude among the students was a
cumulative process. At 5.30 a. m.
neither intelligence nor rowdiness
were particularly noticeable among
either the sophomores, who prepared
coffee and rolls and then woke the
seniors with singing and baskets of
flowers, or among the seniors who
soon discovered that the morning was
not only "new" but practically non-
existent when they arose to partake
of the afore-mentioned coffee and rolls
before setting out to wake Miss Park.
At seven o'clock the rest of the
college gathered under Rockefeller
tower to hear the seniors' Hymn to
the Sun, which had put in an appear-
ance by this time. After watching
the seniors come downstairs, the presi-
dent of the sophomore class, Nancy _
Toll, crowned the president of the
senior class, Lucy Kimberley, Queen
of the May. Each class breakfasted in
a different hall. Thus fortified, the
entire student body entered into the
spirit of the day with true Eliza-
bethan abandon.
Independent couples began to side
and arm, small groups collected to
rehearse the May Day songs anj
those who owned cameras prepared to
immortalize the events of the morn-
ing. Even the sombre nucleus of re-
porters, who had been standing by
with detached curiosity, jigged up
and down a bit when the brassy
booms of the traditional band an-
nounced the arrival of the senior class,
while the three lower classes joined
the hop-skip-and-jump, of the seniors.
The college at large rushed to ffircle
the four May-poles standing upon
Merion Green.
, When, the May-poles were wound,
Miss Park presented Lucy Kimberley
with an amber necklace, which she
said she had had great difficulty in
hiding from the seniors when they
came to wake her, and Miss Kim-
berley cast a rhymed glance into the
future:
"So as the last  will  and bequest of
these ninety-four
Janus-headed   guinea   pigs  e'er   they
go out of door,
I offer past and present
A   reconstruction  of  a  future  anni-
versary which I hope you'll find
Continued on Pace Three
J. M. BROWN WILL GIVE
'BROADWAY IN REVIEW'
On Thursday, May 6, the college
will again have the opportunity of
hearing Mr. John Mason Brown, dra-
matic critic of the New York Evening
Pott, in an informal resume of the
current New York theatrical season,
entitled Broadway in Review.
Mr. Brown spoke last year in the
Deanery to an audience whose size and
manifest appreciation led the Under-
graduate Committee on Entertain-
ments to reserve part of its fund so
that he might return this year. How-
ever, he has generously donated the
entire amount of his lecture fee to the
"Mrs. Otis Skinner Memorial Theater
Workshop," a project in which aa a
student and critic of the drama Mr.
Brown is very much interested.
. In addition to his reviews for the
Post and numerous contributions to
magazines, Mr. Brown is the author
of The Modern Theater in Retfolt, Up-
stage�The American Theater in Per-
formance and Letter* From Green-
room Ghosts.
The lecture will be given at 8.30
p. m. in the auditorium of Goodhart
Hall.