g). Elsie Janis, a very clever mimic, a
delightful dancer, and perhaps the most deservedly popular artist on
our music hall stage, is not a good interpreter of popular songs. She
cannot be compared in this respect with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring,
Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Fannie
Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all the good ones. The
spirit, the very conscious liberties taken with the text (the
vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations as the singer of
early opera embroidered on the score of the composer) are not matters
that just happen. They require any amount of work and experience with
audiences. None of the singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you
find novices who are able to sing Schumann and Franz _lieder_,
although they may be blessed with well-nigh perfect vocal organs.

Still the music critics with strange persistence continue to adjudge a
singer by the old formulae and standards: has she an equalized scale?
Has she taste in ornament? Does she overdo the use of _portamento_,
_messa di voce_, and such devices? How is her shake? etc., etc. But
how false, how ridiculous, this is! Fancy the result if new writers
and composers were criticized by the old laws (so they are, my son,
but not for long)! Creative artists always smash the old tablets of
commandments and it does not seem to me that interpretative artists
need be more unprogressive. Acting changes. Judged by the standards by
which Edwin Booth was assessed John Drew is not an actor. But we know
now that it is a different kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant,
extravagant, and intensely emotional, something quite different from
real life. The present craze for counterfeiting the semblance of
ordinary existence on the stage will also die out for the stage is not
life and representing life on the stage (except in a conventionalized
or decorative form) is not art. Our new actors (with our new
playwrights) will develop a new and fantastic mode of expression
which will supersede the present fashion.... Rubinstein certainly did
not play the piano like Chopin. Presently a _virtuoso_ will appear who
will refuse to play the piano at all and a new instrument without a
tempered scale will be invented so that he may indulge in all the
subtleties between half-tones which are denied to the pianist.

It's all very well to cry, "Halt!" and "Who goes there?" but you can't
stop progress any more than you c