This new entertainment form was instantly successful, and is rapidly becoming the standard offering at all the larger picture houses. It is a significant step in our musical life, for it is the first entirely successful attempt in this country to adapt art to popular wants. At last the average man is going of his own accord into a public hall and hearing music--real music--and discovering that he likes it. The picture house allows him to pretend that he is going solely to see the films, and needn’t listen unless he wants to. He finds that “classical” music is not nearly so boresome as many of its admirers. Freed from the highbrow’s condescension, unconscious of uplift, he listens and responds to music like the prelude to _Tristan_, the _Walkürenritt_, the _New World_ symphony, Tschaikovsky’s _Fourth_, and the _Eroica_. Theodore Thomas rendered no more valuable service to music in America than have Samuel Rothafel and Hugo Riesenfeld. We are still far from utopia, however. In one of his essays upon communal art Henry Caro-Delvaille speaks of “the true Mediterranean _esprit_, the viable art philosophy of the French race, which is essentially plastic, accepting and delineating life, free alike from dogmatism and mysticism.” Try to frame a sentence like that about America. Try to make any generalization about the American spirit without using “liberty,” “free institutions,” “resourcefulness,” “opportunity,” or other politico-economic terms, if you would know what confronts the American artist, above all the American musician, when he attempts to become articulate to his countrymen. We simply have no common æsthetic emotions. No wonder our music flounders and stammers, and trails off into incoherence! Wagner wrote _Die Meistersinger_ in a deliberate effort to express the German artistic creed; Verdi wrote consciously as an Italian; Glinka founded an entire school of composers whose sole aim was to express Russia. Such a task is beyond the American. The others were spokesmen for a race: he has no race to speak for, and the moment he pretends that he has, and tries to speak for it, he becomes conscious and futile. To speak of American music, in any ethnic sense, is naïve; you might as well speak of Baptist music. No. The American must accept his lot. There is but one audience he can write for, and that is himself. John Smith, American composer, dare not say: “I write to express America.” He can only say: “I write to express John Smith. I accept my life because, after all, it is mine, and I interpret my life because it is the only life I know.” And because John Smith is an American, and because somewhere, remote and inarticulate, there must be an American soul, then perhaps, if he does honest work and is true to himself, he may succeed in saying something that is of America, and of nowhere else, and that other Americans will hear and understand. DEEMS TAYLOR POETRY