And so when she creates a character she recreates the opera. Mary Garden is the only singer in opera to whom song is speech. Because in opera song and music have been fused with drama, the voice must become a medium for creating character, thought and emotion, together with the hands, face and body of the actor-singer. There is no need to discuss here what has or what has not been accomplished toward the creation of a new art by this fusion of the arts. You have but to hear and see Mary Garden in _Pelléas and Mélisande_ to find poetry, music, singing and acting united so that the essence of each art comes to us with a rarer flavor than when free. No perfect thing can lose by being united with another perfect thing. However, it is no small task to do this in those older compositions in which music has been written to melodrama, to be sung by elaborate musical instruments. When the music carries beyond the true emotion of the drama, or when it does not reach to the limits of the drama, it is only an artist with flawless intelligence who can break over the barrier of the score and hold the music to the emotion with a backward line of the voice or carry it on by sheer genius to its full task. And what a voice! You can’t quite stand it when Mary Garden sings words like “amour,” “pitié,” “éternel.” It breaks your heart in a strange way, because she makes you feel more precisely our brief longing, our frail tenderness and our deceiving hope. Many people don’t like it—the same ones who don’t like modern painting, the Imagists, Scriabine, and the rest. They have no idea that it is a new kind of instrument, to which they must bring new ears. They say: Why does she sing at all? Why doesn’t she go into straight drama?—never realizing for a moment that she has a longer reach than Bernhardt, a stronger grasp than Duse. There is not enough resistance for her in pure drama. She must paint the canvas full.