Braves' returned from the party convention with a veeling of resentment over their failure to nominate their avourite for the presidency, to denounce in the party latform the Ku Klux Klan, and to secure a promise of ome relief to the thirsty throats of New York. Their esentment has already calmed down; and their leader, ho is a great vote catcher, will no doubt drive them to the Democratic fold in November; but whether heir number will be greater than the Republicans is as et beyond human ken.

Ohio and Indiana lie within the last concentric circle f La Follette's personal influence which distance and eutralising forces weaken. A most important factor a these states will be the power of another leader of the iscontented West. Before La Follette was William ennings Bryan, the 'Peerless Leader' of an evangelised Democracy. Politicians speak scornfully of him and of is waning influence. But Bryan still exerts his magneism from church-pulpit and Chautauqua platform. He 3 fighting for the regeneration of mankind. He called orth the advocates of prohibition, and the eighteenth mendment was passed. He is now preaching the need f a return to the religious belief of the last generation o stabilise the changeable and fickle society of the resent. Bryan is a potent influence in those very classes hat are radical in politics but conservative in matters eligious and moral. The Democrats showed the wisdom f the serpent in reconciling him to their ticket by ominating his brother Charles for the Vice-Presidency. Bryanism with its religious appeal does not appear to e so revolutionary as La Folletteism; and yet it is iberal and will satisfy the longings of the multitude of lain people without political imagination and economic agaries. The chances are, therefore, that in states istant from Wisconsin, the Democrats will adhere to heir old allegiance; the Republicans will be divided. he same condition will probably be manifested in other tates than those named, but at the time when this is eing written the light is too dim to read many of the ages in the Book of Fate.

CLARENCE WALWORTH ALVORD.

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Art. 4.-OPERA IN ENGLAND.

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THIS summer, for the first time since the war, London tried to have a season of opera on the old international scale. It began heroically with a cycle of the Ring des Nibelungen,' given in German by singers bearing frankly German names. On the opening night the house looked brilliant and almost unchanged. When the lights were lowered, and the ground bass of the Rhine boomed out, the years fell away, and the mind went back to those memorable June nights of 1898 when Wagner's huge tetralogy was first admitted to the season, with fashionable singers like Emma Eames and the De Reszkes in the principal parts. The rest of this year's season hardly fulfilled the promise of the beginning. A few performances of 'Der Rosenkavalier' recalled the first production here in 1913, when the 'highbrows' had passed through Wagner to Strauss and were beginning to toy with Stravinsky, and when, at least, Siems, Dux, Von der be Osten, and Knupfer gave an exhibition of operatic art which few of this year's performers could approach. of After that, the season lapsed mainly into repetitions of Puccini and came to a rapid end. Once again it seemed that 'Grand Opera' had failed to establish itself as a normal part of English life.

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There are people who ask a little crossly why so artificial a product as opera (especially in foreign languages) should ever be expected to establish itself at all; and, if they can remember the passages, they quote Figaro's little gibe, 'Aujourd'hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante,' or Addison's sarcasm against the language of current Italian opera, to the effect that Londoners, fatigued by the effort of understanding only half of what they heard, had resolved to understand none of it. The critics of opera point out that in actual life people do not express their sentiments in formal phrases of music, and that when a modern Don Juan desires to give instructions to his valet he does not do it in a da capo aria. They then proceed to declare that opera is artificial (which is true) and therefore detestable (which is false).

It is an odd thing to reproach an art with being

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rtificial. All art is artificial. A picture is artificial. I statue is artificial. A play is artificial. Nevertheless, any people think of works of art in the terms of fact. he farmer could not understand why T. Sidney Cooper's Picture of a cow should be worth more than the living nd milkable model. Was not the cow 'real,' and thereore more valuable? There are people who think that beautiful butterfly framed and hung up is better than framed picture of a butterfly, because it is 'real,' and herefore 'true.' These are generally people of small ultivation, but there are others of note who hover on The verge of the same fallacy, and seek to apply the test f 'reality' to artistic representation. Mr Wells, for nstance, has declared his lack of enthusiasm for Shakepeare, because he cannot abide the conversations of Romeo and Juliet and because no one is sure what is he meaning (if any) of 'Hamlet.' In the same spirit eople ask what is the 'use' of Greek, or poetry, or an ducation that is not 'practical'? The fact is that we re all being bullied just now by science and machinery. Mechanical communism is preached to workmen in the lame of scientific politics. Religion is expected to make erms with science and to surrender most of its functions o something called psycho-analysis. Science claims the bility to measure our value exactly and the right to emit us for ever to scientifically appropriate employnent. Men mounted on machines demand not only all he road, but nearly all the landscape; for if a bend in lane or the foliage of a wood makes the slackening f speed advisable, they clamour for the lane to be traightened, and the wood to be cut down. Having xhausted their faculties by the furious driving of nachines, they go for refreshment to a picture-palace, where they passively watch magnified photographs of young women shedding tears of the largest size. This 8 what they consider 'real' art. It is not surprising, hen, that people approach works of creative art in he spirit of analytical chemists and try to arrange their pinions in accordance with a 'science' of criticism. But science has its limits. H2O may be a symbol for cientific water, but it does not very successfully repreent Thames or Tiber or Nile.

To object to opera on the score of 'unreality' is like

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trying to measure passion with an engine-divided rule Opera is a form of creative art, and all that can be demanded of a work of art is that it shall be true to its own world. Art is not required to be true to the Palace of Engineering. Opera, in the abstract, cannot be good ty or bad, just as painting, in the abstract, cannot be goody or bad: there are good pictures and bad pictures, good operas and bad operas. Opera is one way of telling sing a story on the stage emotionally. Greek drama was for perhaps a similar way of telling a story. We cannot be quite definite about this, as nothing but the libretti remain. What is certain, however, is that the first known operas that got written because a few 16th-century Florentines tried ( to reproduce what they supposed was the effect of classical drama. In the preface to 'Euridice' (1600)-gh the first surviving opera of Europe *-Peri declares Magic expressly that he discovered the new art because he was seeking for the old. The extraordinarily beautiful scene for between Orpheus and the Chorus at the beginning of mo Gluck's opera is no more unreal or artificial than the scene between Antigone and the Chorus in the play of Sophocles. But we can go further. The difference ble between the love-scene in Romeo and Juliet' and the love-scene in 'Tristan und Isolde' is a difference of degree, not of kind. Both are equally unreal,' because young men and women do not conduct their wooing in semi-public places by means of blank-verse or music. Both are 'artificial,' because they are attempts to transmit to an audience emotional effect, and not facts. The moving chapter of Crime and Punishment' which describes how Raskolnikov falls at the feet of Sonya is intensely dramatic,' as we say, but it is not told in the way of drama. The novelist stands like an unseen chorus at the side of his characters, and uses at leisure all his resources of accumulated description. dramatist cannot do this. He must express himself briefly in the immediate speech of his characters-he must make his lovers say 'I love you' in such a way that, not merely the words, but the thrill of their emotion is transmitted at once to the audience. Borrowing an image from science, we may say that the novelist can use

* 'Dafne' preceded it in 1594 or 1597, but does not survive.

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oth space and mass to secure the momentum of a cene; the dramatist has no space and very little mass t his command and must therefore substitute some mmediate intensity. So Shakespeare employs the form f intensity that we call poetry, and Wagner the form f intensity that we call music. Obviously if people are leaf to music they will not like the musical way of xpressing emotion; but they must not blame the nedium for a defect that is in themselves. What we ot infrequently find is a person in whose life music lays no part at all seeking to prove by reason and cience that opera is 'artificial' and therefore to be disouraged. Opera is its own excuse for being. Really ve do not need arguments to prove that 'The Magic Mute' ought to exist: the most convincing argument is The Magic Flute.'

In many European countries opera is a normal and ational form of entertainment. In England it has been xotic almost from the beginning. At first sight it would eem that this country of the masque should have become ery easily a country of the opera. No such development is liscernible. We know too little about Davenant's 'Siege if Rhodes' (1656) to use it as an illustration; but whatwer it was, it was certainly not a masque. The first ndubitable English opera, the ingenuous 'Dido and Eneas' of Purcell, produced some three or four years fter Handel was born, clearly owes nothing to the nasque, and nothing to the play with incidental music. One fact proves this, the nature of the book,' which is pure libretto, devised for musical setting, and incapable f independent existence. Purcell was young when he rote Dido and Eneas' (probably less young than the eventeen of tradition), but though he lived for another wenty years he gave it no successor. Any 17th-century ppetite for music-drama in England appears to have een satisfied by plays with incidental numbers, such as Purcell himself wrote for Shakespeare's Tempest' and Dryden's King Arthur.' To discuss why Dido and Eneas' had no successor would be interesting, but seless. The one indisputable fact is that sixteen years fter the death of Purcell something happened that fixed pon opera in England a tradition of remoteness from ational interests. On Feb. 24, 1711, Handel's 'Rinaldo'

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