t
together.

CHAPTER VI

The position of a successful lyric primadonna with regard to other
artists and the rest of the world is altogether exceptional, and
is not easy to explain. Her value for purposes of advertisement
apparently exceeds that of any other popular favourite, not to mention
the majority of royal personages. A respectable publisher has been
known to bring out a book in which he did not believe, solely because
a leading lyric soprano promised him to say in an interview that it
was the book of the year. Countless brands of cigars, cigarettes,
wines and liquors, have been the fashion with the flash crowd that
frequents public billiard-rooms and consumes unlimited tobacco and
drink, merely because some famous 'Juliet' or 'Marguerite' has
'consented' to lend her name to the articles in question; and half
the grog-shops on both sides of the Atlantic display to the admiring
street the most alarming pink and white caricatures, or monstrously
enlarged photographs, of the three or four celebrated lyric sopranos
who happen to be before the public at any one time. In the popular
mind those artists represent something which they themselves do not
always understand. There is a legend about each; she is either an
angel of purity and light, or a beautiful monster of iniquity; she
has turned the heads of kings--'kings' in a vaguely royal
plural--completely round on their shoulders, or she has built out of
her earnings a hospital for crippled children; the watery-sentimental
eye of the flash crowd in its cups sees in her a Phryne, a Mrs. Fry,
or a Saint Cecilia. Goethe said that every man must be either the
hammer or the anvil; the billiard-room public is sure that every
primadonna is a siren or a martyred wife, or else a public
benefactress, unless she is all three by turns, which is even more
interesting.

In any case, the reporters are sure that every one wants to know just
what she thinks about everything. In the United States, for instance,
her opinion on political matters is often asked, and is advertised
with 'scare-heads' that would stop a funeral or arrest the attention
of a man on his way to the gallows.

Then, too, she has her 'following' of 'girls,' thousands of whom have
her photograph, or her autograph, or both, and believe in her, and are
ready to scratch out the eyes of any older person who suggests that
she is not perfection in every way, or that to be a primadonna like
her ought not to be