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Vol. V.

OCTOBER, 1927

No.5

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SEPTEMBER RECORDS

By THE EDITOR

By an odd coincidence, three of the September bulletins contain clean-shaven cherubic portraits of three composers. On Columbia Sir Hamilton Harty, from whom is emanating the tail of an electric green comet, is perched up in the left-hand corner of a very dark-blue heaven and enclosed in as neat an aureole as you will see. On the H.M. V. bulletin there is a specially drawn portrait of Herr Siegfried Wagner, in which he looks as cherubic as Sir Hamilton Harty, though without his aureole. Finally, on the Parlophone bulletin we have Schumann looking slightly Byronic, but still unmistakably cherubic, his hair done in the modern feminine style with an Eton crop that seems to have been beaten down by the weather. The reproduction of people's faces has not been much improved by photography. When we look through a volume about Napoleon and find twenty portraits of him which might be portraits of twenty different men we allow for the artist's personal impression. \Vhen we look through a volume about some distinguished contemporary and find twenty portraits, each one of which is totally unlike the next, we really don't know what to do. The worst of i t is that there will always be one picture about which the public decides that if the original isn't like i t already the sooner he becomes like i t the better. There is a portrait of Mr. Arnold Bennett, for instance, which will certainly remain the most permanent impression he will have made on his fellow creatures. He may want to bequeath this aspect of himself to posterity; but I doubt i t , for I hear that he has lately taken steps to have that topknot removed. Is that oft-repeated postage-stamp in the Sunday Pictorial getting on his nerves; and does he think he will ever be rid of i t? He will not. The two great terrors that death holds for any man worth an obituary notice are the simultaneous