he place where
it belongs, the author of this undying book has answered your prayer.

_December 11, 1917._

Old Days and New

Old Days and New

Some toothless old sentimentalist or other periodically sets up a
melancholy howl for "the good old days of comic opera," whatever or
whenever they were. Perhaps none of us, once past forty, is guiltless
in this respect. Nothing, not even the smell of an apple-blossom from
the old homestead, the sight of a daguerreotype of a miss one kissed
at the age of ten, or a taste of a piece of the kind of pie that
"mother used to make" so arouses the sensibility of a man of middle
age as the memory of some musical show which he saw in his budding
manhood. That is why revivals of these venerable institutions are
frequently projected and, some of them, very successfully
accomplished. When a manager revives an old drama he must appeal to
the interest of his audience; it may not be the identical interest
which held the original spectators of the piece spell-bound, but, none
the less, it must be an interest. When a manager revives an old
musical comedy he appeals directly to sentiment.

Of course, the exact date of the good old days is a variable quantity.
I have known a vain regretter to turn no further back than to the
nights of _The Merry Widow_, _The Waltz Dream_, _The Chocolate
Soldier_, _The Girl in the Train_, and _The Dollar Princess_, in other
words to the Viennese renaissance; another, in using the phrase, is
subconsciously conjuring up pictures of _La Belle Helene_, _Orphee aux
Enfers_, or _La Fille de Madame Angot_, good fodder for memory to feed
on here; a third will instinctively revert to the Johann Strauss
operetta period, the era of _The Queen's Lace Handkerchief_ and _Die
Fledermaus_; a fourth cries, "Give us Gilbert and Sullivan!" A fifth,
when his ideas are chased to their lair, will rhapsodize endlessly
over the charms of the London Gaiety when _The Geisha_, _The Country
Girl_, and _The Circus Girl_ were in favour; a sixth, it seems, finds
his pleasure in Americana, _Robin Hood_, _Wang_, _The Babes in
Toyland_, and _El Capitan_; a seventh becomes maudlin to the most
utter degree when you mention _Les Cloches de Corneville_, or _La
Mascotte_, products of a decadent stage in the history of French
opera-bouffe. Not long ago I heard a man speak of the cadet operas in
Boston (did a man named Barnet write them?) as the last of the great
musical pieces; and