“Aristotle found an æsthetic value in the purging of the emotions. Well, at the end of _Traviata_ we are left with the feeling that music could not express more completely the particular set of emotions that are stirred by the story of Alfredo, Violetta, and Germont. No critic has ever done justice to the younger Dumas’s _Dame aux Camélias_ either as a novel or as a play. Yet both they and the opera founded upon them have a perennial vitality so marked as almost to tempt me to claim for them an eternal vitality. The actuality of _Traviata_ is so tremendous that on the first night of its production in Venice it was a failure because the soprano playing Violetta was so fat as to revolt the audience’s sense of fact. This seems to me highly significant. You cannot imagine an operatic version of, let us say, _Wuthering Heights_ being hissed off the stage because the Heathcliff revolted any audience’s sense of fact. Now _Wuthering Heights_ much more nearly approximates to melodrama than _La Dame aux Camélias_. The pretentious spiritualism with which a sordid tale of cruelty, revenge, and lust is decked out cannot hide from the sane observer the foolish parody of human nature presented therein. It has been acclaimed as a work of tragic grandeur and sublime imagination as if forsooth grandeur of imagination were to be measured by the remoteness of protagonists or plot from recognisable life. Let us grant that _Traviata_ exhibits a low form of life——” “Or a form of low life,” Nancy interposed.