Page Four THE COLLEGE, NEWS' Noted Critic Explains Beginning of Career Continued from Page One letter of introduction to her husband. She sent him to the Managing Edi- tor, to whom she telephoned before Mr. Woollcott chanced to have gotten all the way out of the house, so that he was enabled to, overhear what she said: He is perfectly willing to clasp her words to his bosom as an epi. taph: “I don’t know whether this | boy will ever be able to write, but | he ought to make a good reporter, be- cause he’s the damndest, nosiest per- son I ever saw.” As it happened, Mr. Woollcetté got his job on The Times, on Which he worked for 19 years; for 13) of them he was a dra- matic critic. Being a dramatic crit- ic is a singular occupation. It was his duty to go to a first night every night, and just as the curtain start- ed to fall, to leap to his feet, tram- pling women and children, to rush to his office with the speed of a glacier, and there to leap at a waiting type- writer, while near him croughed two telegraph operators who wired his criticism to the paper, paragraph by paragraph. The result was that by the time the third paragraph was written, he had forgotten what he had said in the first. He finally broke down. Mr. Woollcott’s advice to the innumerable young people who have asked him how to get where they want to go is that no young person can tell what he will be inter- ested in doing in 15 or 20 years. The field of journalism which now inter- ests him most is the radio, but he could not have foreseen the radio when he decided to be a dramatic critic. Mr. Woollvott described some of the rewards and trials of journalism. All reporters are neurotic because they are hounded by the fear of ty- pographical errors. The New Yorker never has any because it is edited by a maniac on the subject, capable of such vile tempers that a whole office is devoted to nothing but checking | proof. From 18 to 20 pages are sent to press every day, and each page has to pass three individuals, anyone of whom will be shot if any typo- graphical errors are found on any of those pages. But all of Mr.: Wooll- cott’s work was done at midnight, so thathe never had time to see the paper until the second or third edi- | tion; if there was an error, nothing could be done about it then. Slips of type usually produce words of per- fect sartity, as is apparent in his ref- erence to Miss Helen Hayes as wear- ing a “punk” dress, or to Mr. Nathan as a “bottle-scarred” veteran of the war. Such errors are even worse on the radio; when he spoke as_ the “Town Crier,” he frequently referred to himself as the “Crown Tieer.” But one advantage of the radio is that at least the speaker is invisi- ble. Mr. Woollcott realized that. un- til television .is perfected, no Shakes- pearean part, even that of _the—lean and hungry Cassius to Romeo, was beyond him. He did play the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet with Miss Helen Hayes, and only after they had started the broadcast did they realize that they had complete- | ly. forgotten to get a nurse, so that | for the first time, the parts of Romeo | and of the nurse were played by the same person. The rewards of speaking over the radio are incalculable. One evening he broadcast the story of the Christ- mas Eve on the front in 1914, when the Germans were lined up opposite .the English and Scotch along a stretch of Flanders field, at a dis- tance of about 60 yards. The story was told Mr. Woollcott by a young lieutenant, who had been present and heard after the men had crawled into their bunks, the sound of Silent Night played on an accordion in the Ger- man trenches; ~The whole front lis- > tened. When the tune died down, the silence was broken with Onward, Christian Soldiers, played Cockney mouth organ from the Al-| lied trenches. Until about midnight | the concert lasted; then the lieuten- ant was aroused by a sentry, saying, “Something funny has happened, Sir. | We were patrolling the hedge when someone said in English, ‘Why don’t we have a party tomorrow? Here: are some cigarettes.’” The next morning all of No Man’s Land was - full of troops, swapping breakfasts and taking photographs of each -high~black-hats~of-the- French may=+ | Lear: | someone else was about to play the in sl other’s lieutenants. They held a mas- querade in the silk parasols and the ors, which they had swiped on their way through French villages, and a football game was arranged for the next day. But by the next day, word had gotten back to the brigadier-gen- eral and orders came to fire at a cer- tain time. The orders were carried out and some young German soldiers who were out talking peaceably along the front were unfortunately mowed j|down. That end | Ahe fraternizing on the Western front, but the inter- esting part of the story to Mr. Wooll- cott was that the next day after broadcasting it, he received a letter from. a telegraph operator in New Jersey, saying that he had turned on his radio the night before, happened to hear that broadcast, and was writ- ing to Mr. Woollcott because he had been the sentry who woke up the lieutenant and told him = about the message that Christmas Eve. Mr. Woollcott believes that Eugene Field was perhaps the greatest of all newspaper men. He was a dramatic critic in Denver City and was held in awe by every actor. At one of Mrs. Fiske’s first performances in Den- ver City, he threw a bunch of vio- lets at her feet when she came out to take her bow, and pulled them back on a string as she bent to pick them up.. He practiced the cough with which Modjeska punctuated the dy- ing scene of Camille until he had it to such perfection that every whoop from the stage was answered by an antiphonal response from the audi- ence. But perhaps Mr. Field’s great- est claim to fame was his criticism of Preston Clark’s portrayal of King “Last night, Mr. Preston Clark played King Lear. All through the five acts, he played the king as though under an apprehension that ace.” Bryn Mawr Club Invites Students to Holiday Tea Continued from Page One be chaperoned. Our rooms are delight- ful for tea, or as a meeting. place or resting spot between appointments, or dressing room if you are going out to dinner. The Membership Committee, Mrs. Louis Darmstadt (Ruth Rickaby, 1927), Chairman; Mrs. Frederick A. Dewey (Elizabeth Braley, 1914), Mrs. Frederick Conger (Elizabeth Mallet, 1926), Mrs. Henry E, Stehli (Grace Hays, 1927), Miss* Sarah Fraser (1934), reminds you that if you join the Club while you are in | College, you escape the initiation fee —and the undergraduate membership is only five dollars a year. We are looking forward to meeting you on January 3 and we hope | that you will use the Bryn Mawr] Club during your vacations. HELEN RIEGEL OLIVER, (MRS. HOWARD T. OLIVER), President, New York Bryn Mawr Club. PHILIP HARRISON STORE BRYN MAWR, PA. ‘Gotham Gold Stripe Silk Hosiery, $1.00 Best Quality Shoes 1 in Bryn Mawr NEXT DOOR TO THE MOVIES Pius 570 JEANNETT’S BRYN MAWR FLOWER SHOP, Inc. Mrs. N. S. T. Grammer 823 Lancaster Avenue BRYN MAWR, PA. ; mood. Miss Millay Presents _ Reading of Own Poems} Continued from Page One er” itself. The ballad is one of Miss Millay’s finest pieces. The subject is well-suited to her style. A tale told by a young boy of his mother is mat- ter asking tenderness, not passion; calling for description, pictorial rath- er than suggestive. Tenderness and pictorial portrayal of a scene are two qualities in which Miss Millay excels; while deep passion she does not choose to handle, and imaginative sug- gestion she relies on little. Perhaps nowhere does the clear, precise quality of her description or lthe sentiment concealed beneath an. apparently innocent pictorial sketch come out so well as in the closing stanzas of The Harp Weaver: | v “There sat my mother , With the harp against her shoulder, Looking nineteen And not a day older, A smile about her lips, And a light about her head, And her hands in the harpstrings Frozen dead. And piled up beside her And toppling to the skies, Were the clothes of a king’s son Just my size.” In the “Ballad of the Harp Weav- er,” Miss Millay is seeing and tell- ing a story through the eyes and lips of a child. The dwice is a fav- orite one with her, and her handling of the shades of feelings, of a young girl particularly, are always thor- oughly convincing. Single incidents or thoughts she renders in complete sincerity, pictorial or emotional. The snatches, “From A Little Sphinx,” are trifles, but trifles perfect of their kind, because the momentary doubt or gaiety; delight or secretiveness of a child does not demand, in fact, of itself forbids that reflective analysis of mood, which wé cannot but feel constitutes a definite lack in the more ambitious emotidnal efforts of Miss Millay’s serious lyrics and of her sonnets. “Exiled” and “The Buck in _ the Snow,” from the volumes, SECOND APRIL an THE BUCK IN THE SNow, represent Miss Millay in serious “Exiled” brings out the poet’s love for the tangible things of the seashore—the “green piles growing Under the windy wooden piers,” the “bobbing barrels,” and the “black sticks that fence the weirs’”—and the | happy emotion that springs from re- creating the well-known picture in her mind’s eye. “The Buck in the Snow” achieves a clear and beautiful- ly drawn pictorial effect; the con- scious subjection of the thought on death to the beauty of the scene de- FANSLOW Distinctive Sportswear Stetson Hats for Women ARDMORE GREEN HILL FARMS City Line and Lancaster Ave. Overbrook-Philadelphia A reminder that we would like. to take care of your parents and friends, whenever they come to visit you. L. E. METCALF, Manager. ing: it is a You'll have time to see only the best plays in New York during the Christmas holidays: So of course you’re planning to visit MEN IN WHITE it’s the only modern drama that’s a striking success: it is now in its fourth month: it is one of two plays to have received the four-star rat- serious contender for the Pulitzer Detnas not to see it is to ‘miss the most stirring theatrical experience of this amazing season. BROADHURST THEATRE—+4th street west of Broadway Eves. 8:45 p. m.—Seats 50c to $2.50 (plus tax). Mats. Wed. & Sat. 2:40 50c to $2 sos | scribed well illustrates Miss Millay’s conviction that beauty in a bia? ‘al- ways comes before thought. '“Portrait By A Neighbor” was the piece chosen by Miss Millay to be read from the volume, Figs From Thistles. The effect of the poem herg consists in a series of. cleverly con- structed little pictures, which afford by way of illustration a certain unity: of thought. Miss Millay read two new poems, “Sappho Crosses the Dark River Into Hades” and “Apostrophe to Man,” which are to be published next year. The one is a skillfull handling of a tender passion; the other is inter- esting because it was written, reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again.” It’is not a serious poetic effort. Miss Millay concluded her reading by «presenting Two Slatterns. and a King, which she designates’ “a moral interlude.” The poetry, she pointed out, is informal doggerel, but the moral of the poem is a serious -one. LUNCHEON, TEA, DINNER Open Sundays | Chatter-On Tea House 918 Old Lancaster Road Telephone: Bryn Mawr 1185 BRYN MAWR “on | The play is typical of much of her lighter work. Through a rather tri- sented, an old, old moral is brought out,—the great theme of Chance. Her skill lies in the simplicity with which the case is put, and the effortless di- rectness with which she drives home her point. She endeavors always to reduce emotion from the complex to the simple, making up by sincdetity for what shé may thus lose in depth. At Chicago University the dean of students is sending a questionnaire to obtain accurate information re- garding their financial condition. CECELIA’S YARN SHOP Seville Arcade _BRYN MAWR = PA. RICHARD STOCKTON GIFTS BOOKS PRINTS COLLEGE INN TEA ROOM Luncheon 40c - 50c - 75c Dinnet 85c - $1.25 Meals a la carte and table d’hote Daily and Sunday 8.30 A. M. to 7.30 P. M. Afternoon Teas BRIDGE, DINNER PARTIES AND TEAS MAY BE ARRANGED MEALS SERVED ON THE TERRACE WHEN WEATHER’ PERMITS THE PUBLIC IS INVITED Telephone: Bryn Mawr 386 Miss Sarah Davis, Manager 3 SS ¢ ov \ An “aie CENTS Isn°t Much? Most college allowances go only so far. But even at that you can once a week. It isn’t much —35 probably spare 35 cents cents—hardly the price of a movie or shampoo. Yet for 35 cents, if you know the ropes, ~ as 100 miles. you can telephone as far That probably means you can telephone home! Can 35 cents buy more pleasure than that? You can pick up a budget of family news... talk over your problems . . . share your interests. There’s nothing like a “voice visit” with the folks back home to brighten : your whole week—and theirs. eo ® ° TO TAKE ADVANTAGE ~ ee: Low NIGHT RATES... person. Station Call after 8:30 P. M. Standard Time, and be sure to make a Station to Station call. That_means, ask the Operator for your: home ‘telephone, but not for any specific If you’ve fixed a date in advance, the family will be sure to be there. 35 cents at night will pay for a 3-minute to Station call to anywhere within 100 miles. ° fling incident, lightly and wittily pre- — ¢