perverse, senile sentimentalities, there were not in these years more than three British playwrights who could be trusted to give a recognisable representation of life. The mystery is deepened by the fact that, during the same period, the English, who accept with resignation if not with pride the stigma of being unmusical, crowded a lifetime of musical progress into a few years. Covent Garden has always been a battleground between those who wish to hear the greatest number of the most interesting operas in their best rendering and those who find a box and the second half of a tuneful banality the best place and time for meeting again the friends whom they have not seen since dinner. For a generation the two armies existed amicably side by side on a compromise by which the music-lovers secured that, whatever the opera, it should be competently given and the others conceded that it might be competently given so long as no experiments or innovations were made. Year after year the hackneyed _Rigolettos_ and _Lohengrins_, the _Traviatas_ and _Tannhaüsers_ soothed the conservative hearing of any one whose musical education had been arrested in childhood; from time to time the _Ring_ was given, but the inordinate length of each part provided a plausible excuse for those who stayed at home, and a martyr's crown or at least a victor's laurel for those who attended. Then, without warning, the new artistic receptivity spread to music, and a trial was offered to new men and to new works. _Der Rosenkavalier_ and _Elektra_ were given in those years; _Parsifal_ was played for the first time in England; and all whose knowledge of ballet was limited to the Empire and Adeline Genée found themselves led to a mountain-top and invited to regard the new world wherein Pavlova and Mordken, Karsavina and Nijinski lorded it. With the Russian ballet and under the shadow of war came the Russian opera; and, while the old repertory was played at Covent Garden, a new ecstacy was offered at Drury Lane by _Prince Igor_, _Boris Godounov_ and _Ivan le terrible_. With the Russian opera came an artist whose admirers have not yet determined whether he is greater as a singer or as an actor, though they agree that as a combination of the two he is the greatest figure on any operatic stage in the world. The incomparable voice and superb presence of Chaliapin blew a new vigour of youth and a new conception of beauty into the stale dust of the London theatre.