The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come into the song.  Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained, but how much is lost?  Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the voice lose something also, in its directness of appeal?  Add acting to voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in which other arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have us see the supreme form of art.  Again something is lost; we lose more and more, perhaps for a greater gain.  Tristan sings lying on his back, in order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man.  For the sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty.  Let us rejoice in the gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has been found.

An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter between poetry and the world.

Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by masses of loosely twisted blonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or passionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquent mouth.  She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure vaguely, supple to every movement.  When she sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean.  When I heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to her; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herself to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of that image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror:  it was herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement.  Her voice is strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer; her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and sets her whole being violently and delicately before you.  She makes a drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music.  It is as much with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the melody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all its lines.  There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it? tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who takes in energy at all her senses