ely
nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no
allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on
to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and
dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but
never-ending as the race itself."

"You would like a good deal more than you are ever likely to get," we
said; and here we thought it was time to bring our visitor to book
again. "But about the decline of vaudeville?"

"Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it
is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or
at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville
must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions yet
unexplored. It must seize not only the fleeting moments, but the
enduring moments of experience; it should be wise not only to the whims
and moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of men; for it
appeals to a public not sophisticated by mistaken ideals of art, but
instantly responsive to representations of life. Nothing is lost upon
the vaudeville audience, not the lightest touch, not the airiest shadow
of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at the legitimate
theatres--"

"Then what you wish," we concluded, "is to elevate the vaudeville."

The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with something between a
groan and a growl. "You mean to kill it."

V

INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA

Whether pleasure of the first experience is more truly pleasure than
that which comes rich in associations from pleasures of the past is a
doubt that no hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We
should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case we should be
without such small occasion as we now have to suggest it in the
forefront of a paper which will not finally pass beyond the suggestion.
When the reader has arrived at our last word we can safely promise him
he will still have the misgiving we set out with, and will be confirmed
in it by the reflection that no pleasure, either of the earliest or the
latest experience, can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than
the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the surprise will
have less of disappointment in it than the unsurprise. In the one case,
the case of youth, say, there will be the racial disappointment to count
with, and in the other, the case of a