Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship, restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in sufficient numbers to make its presentation a success if it had been achieved in London. It was said that in any effort to arrive at an estimate of American culture, or to state that culture in terms of English culture, we should have to find landmarks in trifles. All these things are such trifles. Let us concede that _Cyrano_ is not the greatest literature, nor is Verestschagin's work the highest art; still neither the one nor the other is properly a negligible quantity in the sum-total of the creative work of the generation. There may be many American women who do not know their Verdi, and it may be that Madame de Navarro's estimate of Miss Morris, mine of Mr. Mansfield, and that of certain American critics of Edward MacDowell are equally at fault; but it still remains absurd to take ignorance of the Italian operas as characteristic of American women or to talk contemptuously, as many Englishmen do, of the American theatre, because they have no knowledge of it beyond what they have seen of the one class of production from _The Belle of New York_ to _The Prince of Pilsen_, or of American music, because their acquaintance with it begins and ends with Sousa and the writers of "coon songs." * * * * *