fortnight and wait weary hours
at the gallery door of Covent Garden to hear Caruso, Scotti, Melba, and
Journet as the Bohemians. What nights! I remember very clearly that
first visit. I had heard other singers, English singers, the best of
whom are seldom better than the third-rate Italians, but Caruso.... What
is he? He is not a singer. He is not a voice. He is a miracle. There
will not be another Caruso for two or three hundred years; perhaps not
then. We had been so accustomed to the spurious, manufactured voices of
people like de Reszke and Tamagno and Maurel, that when the genuine
article was placed before us we hardly recognized it. Here was something
lovelier than anything that had yet been heard; yet we must needs stop
to carp because it was not quite proper. All traditions were smashed,
all laws violated, all rules ignored. Jean de Reszke would strain and
strain, until his audience suffered with him, in order to produce an
effect which this new singer of the South achieved with his hands in his
pockets, as he strolled round the stage.

The Opera in London is really more of a pageant than a musical function.
The front of the house frequently claims more attention than the stage.
On Caruso and Melba nights it blazes. Tiers and tiers of boxes race
round in a semicircle. If you are early, you see them as black gaping
mouths. But very soon they are filled. The stalls begin to leap with
light, for everybody who is not anybody, but would like to be somebody,
drags out everything she possesses in the way of personal adornment,
and sticks it on her person, so that all the world may wonder. At each
box is a bunch of lights, and, with the arrival of the silks and
jewellery, they are whipped to a thousand scintillations.

The blaze of dancing light becomes painful; the house, especially
upstairs, is spitefully hot. Then the orchestra begin to tumble in;
their gracefully gleaming lights are adjusted, and the monotonous A
surges over the house--the fiddles whine it, the golden horns softly
blare it, and the wood-wind plays with it.

But now there is a stir, a sudden outburst of clapping. Campanini is up.
Slowly the lights dissolve into themselves. There is a subdued rustle as
we settle ourselves. A few peremptory _Sh-sh-sh!_ from the ardent
galleryites.

Campanini taps. His baton rises ... and suddenly the band mumbles those
few swift bars that send the curtain rushing up on the garret scene.
Only a few bars ... yet so