Grand opera by its very character is outside such simple criticism as this; it is outside all talk of voice production or singing off key or distracting the conductor. There is a measurable value in the component parts of any art, but the test that cannot be analyzed lies in the unity of these parts. This unity is the principle of Art. But grand opera is a composite of the arts, and the true test for it should lie in the unity of the employed arts, not in weighing any part of any one art. People will rave for days if Mary Garden fails in a note, although the aesthetic and emotional experience of the whole was unmarred; but the same people will never be disturbed if Galli-Curci moves about the stage like a lost cloak-model and breaks up the picture of the whole illusion by holding her body in positions not possible in human awkwardness; and is so intent on breathing that she almost forgets to attend to Juliet’s funeral. So long as she sings according to a fixed standard she need go no further than a moving-picture screen. And Mary must be decried, though her performance hold in color like a tapestry and move in rhythm like a frieze. When anything is as far from life as sung dialogue it must have a different treatment than either pure song or pure drama. Decoration should be the design for opera: a libretto that is a dramatic poem, music working itself out in a decoration for the poem, scenery a design of the matter and feeling of the libretto, and actors that can point the design not in the realistic day-life manner of the drama but with decorative acting. With this we might have great grand opera. One thing we have now: the great decorative actress _and_ singer, Mary Garden. Mary Garden is the biggest thing on our horizon today. To think that flesh could be so intelligent! She gives as generously of her undraped body as a Rodin statue; and the audience gives her back their applause, grudgingly, not knowing the great art of her. To put Rodin into inspired motion, but to do more than that even—! In the next issue I shall try to write of all she does,—Mary Garden, ... “This Cyprian She is a million, million changing things. She brings more joy than any god; she brings More pain. I cannot judge her. May it be An hour of mercy when she looks on me.” “_What Is Art?_” When Tagore first gave his lecture on Art in Chicago I was not here, and all I could read about it or find out about it by asking was that it was anti-Tolstoyan. But I got the whole truth of it in a sentence when I asked a pupil of Tagore’s, a young artist, “What does Mr. Tagore say in his lecture on Art?” “What does he say? Oh, he just says what it is, this Art.”