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.

It would do no harm to any singer to study the multitude of vocal
effects this artist achieves. I can think of nobody who could not
learn something from her. How, for example, she gives her voice the
hue and colour of a _jeune fille_ in _Pelleas et Melisande_, for
although Melisande had been the bride of Barbe-Bleue before Golaud
discovered her in the forest she had never learned to be anything else
than innocent and distraught, unhappy and mysterious. Her treatment of
certain important phrases in this work is so electrifying in its
effect that the heart of every auditor is pierced. Remember, for
example, her question to Pelleas at the end of the first act,
"_Pourquoi partez-vous?_" to which she imparts a kind of dre