e United
States know Grieg better than he is known in England (that is to say,
that a larger proportion of the people, outside the classes which
professedly account themselves musical, have more or less acquaintance
with his music), just as they know the work of half a dozen English
composers, MacDowell, though he had played his pianoforte concertos in
London, remained almost unknown in England outside of strictly musical
circles. It is certain that had MacDowell been an Englishman he would
have been immensely better known in America than, being an American, he
ever was in England.

In the kindred field of the drama the general English idea of the
American stage is based chiefly on acquaintance with that noisy type of
"musical comedy" of which so many specimens have in recent years been
brought to England from the other side of the Atlantic. It is as if
Americans judged English literature by Miss Marie Corelli and Guy
Thorne. Those things are brought to England because they are opined by
the managers to be the sort of thing that England wants or which is
likely to succeed in England, not because they are what America
considers her best product. To attempt any comparison of the living
playwrights or actors in the two countries would be a thorny and
perilous undertaking; and if any comparison is to be made at all it must
be done lightly and as far as possible examples must be drawn from those
who are no longer actively on the boards. Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary
Anderson) has deliberately put on record her opinion of Miss Clara
Morris as "the greatest emotional actress I ever saw." It is not likely
that when Madame de Navarro pronounced that estimate she was forgetting
either Miss Terry or Mrs. Campbell--or Mesdames Rejane and Bernhardt or
Signora Duse. Madame de Navarro is no mean judge: and those who have
read Miss Morris's wonderful book, _Life on the Stage_, will think the
judgment in this case not incredible.

Similarly I believe that in Mr. Richard Mansfield the United States has
just lost an actor who had not his peer in earnestness, scholarship,
restraint, and power on the English stage. I am not acquainted with an
English actor to-day who, in the combination of all these qualities, is
in his class. His "Peer Gynt" was a thing which, I believe, no living
English actor could have approached, and I gravely doubt whether England
would have furnished a public who would have appreciated it in
sufficient numbers to ma