To return.  The Metropolitan Opera-House in New York is a much more satisfactory example of a theatrical interior.  Indeed, it is very fine, especially when strung from end to end of its first tier with pearls, as I saw it.  Impossible to find fault with its mundane splendor.  And let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement.  It is regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate.  If the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses did not!

Artistically, of course, the spectacle of a grand-opera season in an American city is just as humiliating as it is in the other Anglo-Saxon country.  It was disconcerting to see Latin or German opera given exactly—­with no difference at all; same Latin or German artists and conductors, same conventions, same tricks—­in New York or Philadelphia as in Europe.  And though the wealthy audiences behaved better than wealthy audiences at Covent Garden (perhaps because the boxes are less like inclosed pews than in London), it was mortifying to detect the secret disdain for art which was expressed in the listless late arrivings and the relieved early departures.  The which disdain for art was, however, I am content to think, as naught in comparison with the withering artistic disdain felt, and sometimes revealed, by those Latin and German artists for Anglo-Saxon Philistinism.  I seem to be able to read the sarcastic souls of these accomplished and sensitive aliens, when they assure newspaper reporters that New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and London are really musical.  The sole test of a musical public is that it should be capable of self-support—­I mean that it should produce a school of creative and executive artists of its own, whom it likes well enough to idolize and to enrich, and whom the rest of the world will respect.  This is a test which can be safely applied to Germany, Russia, Italy, and France.  And in certain other arts it is a test which can be applied to Anglo-Saxondom—­but not in music.  In America and England music is still mainly a sportive habit.

When I think of the exoticism of grand opera in New York, my mind at once turns, in contrast, to the natural raciness of such modest creations as those offered by Mr. George Cohan at his theater on Broadway.  Here, in an extreme degree, you get a genuine instance of a public demand producing the desired artist on the spot.  Here is something really and honestly and respectably American.  And why it should be derided by even the most lofty pillars of American taste, I cannot imagine. (Or rather, I can imagine quite well.) For myself, I spent a very agreeable evening in witnessing “The Little Millionaire.”  I was perfectly conscious of the blatancy of the methods that achieved it.  I saw in it no mark of genius.