my mind, a
result of her cinema experiences. In fact, the New York critics should
have remembered that when Mme. Farrar made her debut at the Metropolitan
Opera House in the role of Juliette, they had rebuked her for these very
qualities. She had indulged in a little extra realism in the bedroom and
balcony scenes of Gounod's opera, of the sort with which Miss Nethersole
created ten-minute furores in her performances of Carmen and Sapho.
Again, as Marguerite in _Faust_ (her Margherita in _Mefistofele_ was a
particularly repressed and dreamy representation of the German maiden,
one instinct with the highest dramatic and vocal values in the prison
scene), she devised "business" calculated to startle, dancing the jewel
song, and singing the first stanza of the _Roi de Thule_ air from the
cottage, whither she had repaired to fetch her spindle of flax--this
last detail seemed to me a very good one. In early representations of
_Madama Butterfly_ and _La Boheme_ her death scenes were fraught with an
intense realism which fitted ill with the spirit of the music. I
remember one occasion on which Cio-Cio-San knocked over the
rocking-chair in her death struggles, which often embraced the range of
the Metropolitan stage.

These points have all been urged against her at the proper times, and
there seemed small occasion for attributing her extra activities in the
first act of Bizet's opera, in which the cigarette girl engaged in a
prolonged scuffle with her rival in the factory, or her more recent
whistling of the seguidilla, to her moving-picture experiences. No, Mme.
Farrar is overzealous with her public. She once told me that at every
performance she cut herself open with a knife and gave herself to the
audience. This intensity, taken together with her obviously unusual
talent and her personal attractiveness, is what has made her a more than
ordinary success on our stage. It is at once her greatest virtue and her
greatest fault, artistically speaking. Properly manacled, this quality
would make her one of the finest, instead of merely one of the most
popular, artists now before the public. But I cannot see how the cinema
can be blamed.

When I first saw the Carmen of Mme. Farrar, her second or third
appearance in the part, I was perplexed to find an excuse for its almost
unanimous acclamation, and I sought in my mind for extraneous reasons.
There was, for example, the conducting of the score by Mr. Toscanini,
but that, like Mme.