There is a subtle but definite sense of analogy of line which goes through all the arts. It is obvious in acting and painting. Why shouldn’t it be sought in decoration when decoration is dependent upon words? Bernard Shaw has perhaps but one line—the straight horizontal line. He cuts through clear and straight—a cross-section of life. He brings people and all their relations out upon this broad flat plane. That’s Shaw. I didn’t mind that the text of _Mrs. Warren_ called for period architecture; it was the insistence on the long perpendicular line that maddened me. And the color! There, too, was a chance for line. But—well, who can tell how bad the performance was with the futile effort of the denying horizontal lines of the play against the asserting perpendicular lines of the scenery? _Moore and More_ I have been reading Frank Harris in _Pearson’s_ on George Moore’s _The Brook Kerith_. What Mr. Harris really does is to jump on George Moore for not writing a history of the life of Christ—the sociology, biology, and geology of Jerusalem. Only in books of information and science does the writer have to submerge his personality and let the facts have first place. But Mr. Moore thought he was making a work of art, and here no one will deny the first right to the personality of the artist. Mr. Harris cavils about types, landscapes, customs, etc. Almost the only presentation of Christ outside the Bible has been in painting. Have those painters “defiled our most sacred spiritual possessions” who, from the day when Florence knelt in her streets before Cimabue’s Madonna, have painted every incident in the life of Christ and of the Holy Family in every setting from an Italian pasture to a Medici palace, using Italian types, Italian dress, Italian gestures? Has the great El Greco defiled the Christian religion because he painted Spanish Christs and saints in tomb-damp colors? Did Michael Angelo dethrone God because in his _Creation_ he painted him with beard and flowing robe on his own authority? And the Germans and the Dutch? They must have been all leagued together to “misrepresent through ignorance,” according to such critics as Mr. Harris. But who can say that they have not raised the tradition to a height the old Jews dared not dream? “_A. E._” There is a great interest in America just now over A. E.—poet, painter, mystical teacher, labor leader, economist, and editor. There are lectures by Colum, reviews of his books, studies of his life, a revival of the reading of George Moore’s _Salve_ where he is portrayed with such love, and in January we are to have an exhibition of his paintings brought from Ireland by a Chicago woman at her own expense and loaned to the Art Institute. To my knowledge only once before have any of A. E.’s paintings been seen in Chicago. There were two with the “Cubists.”