Even my own opinion of this artist's work has undergone a change. I have always regarded her as one of the few great interpreters, but in the light of recent experience I now feel assured that she is the greatest artist on the contemporary lyric stage. It is not, I would insist, Mary Garden that has changed so much as we ourselves. She has, it is true, polished her interpretations until they seem incredibly perfect, but has there ever been a time when she gave anything but perfect impersonations of Melisande or Thais? Has she ever been careless before the public? I doubt it. The fact of the matter is that when Mary Garden first came to New York only a few of us were ready to receive her at anywhere near her true worth. In a field where mediocrity and brainlessness, lack of theatrical instinct and vocal insipidity are fairly the rule her dominant personality, her unerring search for novelty of expression, the very completeness of her dramatic and vocal pictures, annoyed the philistines, the professors, and the academicians. They had been accustomed to taking their opera quietly with their after-dinner coffee and, on the whole, they preferred it that way. But the main obstacle in the way of her complete success lay in the matter of her voice, of her singing. Of the quality of any voice there can always exist a thousand different opinions. To me the great beauty of the middle register of Mary Garden's voice has always been apparent. But what was not so evident at first was the absolute fitness of this voice and her method of using it for the dramatic style of the artist and for the artistic demands of the works in which she appeared. Thoroughly musical, Miss Garden has often puzzled her critical hearers by singing _Faust_ in one vocal style and _Thais_ in another. But she was right and they were wrong. She might, indeed, have experimented still further with a new vocal technique if she had been given any encouragement but encouragement is seldom offered to any innovator. As Edgar Saltus puts it, "The number of people who regard a new idea or a fresh theory as a personal insult is curiously large; indeed they are more frequent today than when Socrates quaffed the hemlock." It must, therefore, be a source of ironic amusement to her to find herself now appreciated not alone by her public, which has always been loyal and adoring, but also by the professors themselves.