The sound of marching feet could now be heard. Swiftly he ran to the door. As he reached the threshold he turned. His mother, her eyes shining with love and hope, was waving a last good-bye. Down the stairs, out the back door, and across the fields sped the child. Over grass and across streams flew the sure little feet. His heart tugged fiercely to go back, but that look in his mother's face sustained him.

He knew the road to Holland. It was straight to the north; but he kept to the fields. He did n't want the baby discovered. Mile after mile, through hour after hour he pushed on, until twilight came. He found a little spring and drank thirstily. Then he moistened the baby's mouth. The little creature was very good. Occasionally she uttered a feeble cry, but most of the time she slept. The boy was intensely weary. His feet ached. He sat down under a great tree and leaned against it. Was it right to keep a baby out all night? Ought he to go to some farmhouse? If he did, would the people take baby away? His mother had said, 'Run straight to Holland.' But Holland was twenty miles away. He opened his coat and looked at the tiny creature. She slept peacefully.

The night was very warm. He decided to remain where he was. It had grown dark. The trees and bushes loomed big. His heart beat quickly. He was glad of the warm, soft, live little creature in his arms. He had come on this journey for his mother, but suddenly his boy's heart opened to the tiny clinging thing at his breast. His little hand stroked the baby tenderly. Then he stooped, and softly his lips touched the red wrinkled face. Presently his little body relaxed and he slept. He had walked eight miles. Through the long night the deep sleep

motionless, head and shoulders resting against the tree-trunk, and the newborn babe enveloped in the warmth of his body and arms slept also. The feeble cry of the child woke him. The sun was coming over the horizon and the air was alive with the twitter of birds.

At first he thought he was at home and had awakened to a long happy summer's day. Then the fretful little cries brought back memory with a rush. His new-born love flooded him. Tenderly he laid the little sister down. Stretching his stiff and aching body he hurried for water. Very carefully he put a few drops in the little mouth and wet the baby's lips with his little brown finger. This proved soothing and the cries ceased. The tug of the baby's lips on his finger clutched his heart. The helpless little thing was hungry, and he too was desperately hungry. What should he do? His mother had spoken of milk. He must get milk. Again he gathered up his burden and buttoned his coat. From the rising ground on which he stood he could see a farmhouse with smoke issuing from its chimney. He hurried down to the friendly open door. A kindly woman gave him food. She recognized him as a little refugee bound for Holland. He had difficulty in concealing the baby, but fortunately she did not cry. The woman saw that he carried something, but when he asked for milk she concluded he had a pet kitten. He accepted this explanation. Eagerly he took the coveted milk and started on.

But day-old babies do not know how to drink. When he dropped milk into the baby's mouth she choked and sputtered. He had to be content with moistening her mouth and giving her a milk-soaked finger.

Refreshed by sleep and food, the boy set off briskly. Holland did not now

seem so far off. If only his mother were safe! Had the Germans been good to her? These thoughts pursued and tormented him. As before, he kept off the beaten track, making his way through open meadows and patches of trees. But as the day advanced, the heat grew intense. His feet ached, his arms ached, and, worst of all, the baby cried fretfully.

At noon he came to a little brook sheltered by trees. He sat down on the bank and dangled his swollen feet in the cool, fresh stream. But his tiny sister still cried. Suddenly a thought came to him. Placing the baby on his knees he undid the towel that enveloped her. There had been no time for clothes. Then he dipped a dirty pocket handkerchief in the brook and gently sponged the hot, restless little body. Very tenderly he washed the little arms and legs. That successfully accomplished he turned the tiny creature and bathed the small back. Evidently this was the proper treatment, for the baby grew quiet. His heart swelled with pride. Reverently he wrapped the towel around the naked little one, and administering a few drops of milk, again

stiffly a small boy slid to the ground. He had been picked up just over the border by a friendly farmer and driven to camp. He was dirty, bedraggled, and footsore. Very kindly the ladies' committee received him. He was placed at a table and a bowl of hot soup was set before him. He ate awkwardly with his left hand. His right hand held something beneath his coat, which he never for a moment forgot. The women tried to get his story, but he remained strangely silent. His eyes wandered over the room and back to their faces. He seemed to be testing them. Not for an hour, not until there was a faint stirring in his coat, did he disclose his burden. Then, going to her whom he had chosen as most to be trusted, he opened his jacket. In a dirty towel lay a naked, miserably thin, three-daysold baby.

Mutely holding out the forlorn object, the boy begged help. Bit by bit they got his story. Hurriedly a Belgian Refugee mother was sent for. She was told what had happened, and she took the baby to her breast. Jealously the boy stood guard while his tiny sister had her first real meal. But the spark of life was very low.

For two days the camp concentrated on the tiny creature. The boy never left his sister's side. But her ordeal had been too great. It was only a feeble flicker of life at best, and during the third night the little flame went out. The boy was utterly crushed. He had now but one thought to reach his mother. It was impossible to keep the news from him longer. He would have gone in search. Gently he was told of the skirmish that had destroyed the Belgian hamlet. There were no houses or people in the town that had once been his home.

"That is his story,' ended the friendly little Dutch woman.

I

THE form of drama with music which we loosely call 'opera' is such a curious mixture of many elements- some of them closely related, others nearly irreconcilable that it is almost impossible to arrive at any definite idea of its artistic value. A great picture or piece of sculpture, a great book or a great symphony represents a perfectly clear evolution of a well-defined art. You do not question the artistic validity of Pendennis or of a portrait by Romney; they have their roots in the earlier works of great writers and painters and they tend toward those which follow. The arts they represent grew by a slow process of evolution, absorbing everything that was useful to them and rejecting everything useless, until they finally became consistent and self-contained. The development of opera, on the other hand, has been a continual compromise with the whims of princes, with the even more wayward whims of singers, and with social conventions.

Its increasing costliness (due sometimes to the composer's grandiloquence and sometimes to the demands of the public) has necessitated producing it in huge opera houses entirely unsuited to it; and, being a mixed art, it has been subject to two different influences which have not by any means always been in agreement. Its life-line has been crossed over and over again by daring innovators who, forgetting the past, have sought to force it away from nature and to make it an expression

of excessive individualism. Methods which would find oblivion quickly enough in any pure form of art have been carried out in opera, and have been supported by an uncritical public pleased by a gorgeous spectacle or entertained by fine singing. All the other art-forms progress step by step; opera leaps first forward, then backward; it becomes too reasonable, only to become immediately afterward entirely unreasonable; it passes from objectivity to subjectivity and back again, or employs both at the same time; it turns a man into a woman, or a woman into a man; it thinks nothing of being presented in two languages at once; it turns colloquial Bret Harte into Italian without the slightest realization of having become, in the process, essentially comic: in short, there seems no limit to the havoc it can play with geography, science, language, costume, drama, music, human nature itself.

Any attempt, therefore, to deal here with the development of opera as a whole would be an impossible undertaking. We should become at once involved in a glossary of singers (now only names, then in effect constituting the opera itself), an unsnarling of impossible plots, an excursion into religion, into the ballet, into mythology, demonology, pseudo-philosophy, mysticism, and Heaven knows what else. We should see our first flock of canary birds, released simply to make us gape, and we should hear a forest bird tell the hero (through the medium of a singer off the stage) the way to a

sleeping beauty; we should hear the hero and the villain sing a delightful duet and then see them turn away in different directions to seek and murder each other; we should find the Pyramids and the Latin Quarter expressible in the same terms; our heroines would include the mysterious and demoniac scoffer, Kundry, the woman who doubts and questions, the woman who should have but did not, and the woman who goes mad and turns the flute-player in the orchestra to madness with her; we should see men and women, attired in inappropriate and even unintelligible costumes, drink out of empty cups, and a hero mortally wound a papier-mâché dragon; we should have to shut our eyes in order to hear, or stop our ears in order to see; if we cared for music, we should have to wait ten minutes for a domestic quarrel in recitative to finish; if we cared for drama, we should have to wait the same length of time while a prima donna tossed off birdling trills and chirpings. We should, in short, find ourselves dealing with a mixed art of quite extraordinary latitude in style, form, dramatic purpose, and musical texture.

It will be sufficient for our purposes, therefore, to state that both sacred and secular plays with music have existed from the earliest times, and that their development has tended toward the form as we now know it. The introduction of songs into plays was, in itself, so agreeable and interesting that their use continually increased until some vague operatic form was reached in which music predominated.

But there are two great revolutionary epochs to which proper attention must be paid if we are to understand opera at all. The first of these is the so-called 'Florentine Revolution' in the years 1595 to 1600, and the second is the Wagnerian reform in the middle of the last century.

II

The 'Florentine Revolution' was an attempt to create an entirely new type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To Eurydice, the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote a preface from which we quote the following: "Therefore, abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded by this poem.' (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment, for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up, and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art entirely detached from an old one: Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it because opera can subsistit has, and does without logic or even reasonableness.