other part of the river, but for some occult reason, probably owing to our American blood, it seemed absurd to ride around twelve miles to a point we could reach in three hundred yards of tunnel. On the other hand, it is a fixed principle of wise traveling for pleasure never to use a railroad if it can conveniently be avoided, so we decided to walk over the mountain to the other side. But we sent our bicycles by rail. Thus we reached the top cool and in a good humor.

It was a characteristic low mountain view of a river valley. The Moselle ran away from the eye into the hazy distance with the same suggestion of great reaches of fertile fields filled with small communities free from fret and strain which floats up to the top of Mount Holyoke from the narrow silver stretches and broad green meadows of the upper Connecticut. The village in front of us across the river was bordered by little sections of arable field, and the varied crops gave it the appearance of being surrounded by stripes of differentcolored paint. The keeper of the signaltower told us these were the portions of the village land assigned every year by lot, each to a burgher, and worked by him according to a system of rotation of crops. Probably this annual gamble to decide whether he was to have the chance of living the coming twelve months on beans or potatoes or cabbage was, to the average inhabitant, his greatest excitement. For in these old communities men seem to be whittled out by fate to fit into sockets. Perhaps our inward revolt against this reflection showed in our faces and suggested anarchy and revolution to our informant, or it may have been that the suspicion evident in his glance arose simply from the usual difficulty of the peasant in deciding whether the inquiring traveler is a spy or a fool. At all events, he was still regarding us with a doubtful eye as we left him to go down to Alf.

There was a little daylight yet to come when we got our wheels again, and, instead of sitting to watch the river flowing past the pier, we must needs employ it in riding up to Bad Bertrich. The lower part of the tiny side valley was quietly beautiful, with low rough

cliffs and smooth beeches hanging over the road; but it ended badly in a village pervaded by the strains of a brass band, infested with souvenir booths, and swarming with what the Germans call "sommer frische leute "-in American, “summer boarders." We pushed on to the summit of the watershed, and longed to run down into the unknown country on the other side. The falling darkness was clothing the earth before us with gentle mystery, and we felt assured that just around the little ridge where the road turned there was a landscape of most ravishing beauty. But we had to come back leaving it unseen.

The part of the river valley we followed next morning is strewn with castles whose situations give to their ruins a most piratical air. But it seems as if their former owners must, even in their palmiest days, have been somewhat out at elbows. The profession of nobleman was entirely overdone in this vicinity, and doubtless the robber barons had hard times to pick up a living, because the demand for robbable passers must have exceeded the supply. As happens now in New England towns, there could scarcely have been enough game to go round, even meagerly, among so many hunters. The crags with their towers and walls, and the little towns below, give to some bends of the river so bizarre an appearance that we had a sense of being cheated-a lurking suspicion that we were looking at a setting arranged by some scene-painter for picturesque effect.

The Moselle is free from the ceaseless bustle that gives a Sunday excursion atmosphere to the Rhine. No steamers run in the season of low water, and the railroad leaves the bank for stretches of many miles. We rode along the broader valley of the lower river, past fields bright with autumn crocus, in a mood of almost sleepy serenity.

It was rudely broken by a suburban policeman of Coblentz, which lies near the meeting of the Rhine and the Moselle. He explained the bicycle regulations, and we felt that the only sure way to escape arrest was to walk into the city. We arrived, therefore, at "The Golden Pig " in no serene mood.

A

LTHOUGH Mr. Heinrich Conried at the present moment occupies a spectacular position, his true importance does not rest upon the fact that he undertook the management of the Metropolitan Opera Company and produced "Parsifal." His present eminent post is rather a tribute to what many years of conspicuous labor have accomplished. Although his first season in grand opera has made for him a National reputation, the abilities which it has brought into evidence are those which have long been exhibited in his conduct of the only high-grade stock theater company in America, and the worth of things is not measured by the light in which they are performed. Size enters too much to-day into our defininition of the word success.

In the opera Mr. Conried has to some extent applied the principles which he inherited from Germany and upon which he built up his theater in Irving Place. To a certain extent, also, he has departed from them, forced by shortness of time and by the pressure of American taste. Another season will bring the opera nearer to what he planned for it, nearer to the German ideal of an artistic whole; but it may also bring him nearer to our showier standards, to our need of special stimulation, novelty, and personal centers of attention; for acknowledged success is tempting to some men, and it is not impossible that Mr. Conried may become a follower rather than a leader of American taste. We shall live to see; but I personally confess a taint of jealousy in myself over this operatic glamour, not only because through it the only satisfy ing playhouse in America may degenerate, but also because a more needed, although more modest, enterprise, of which Mr. Conried has been thinking for years, is now less likely to be carried out, since, measured by reverberation and applause, it would be the opposite of a climax. For a long time Mr. Conried has been promising to his friends the

establishment of a repertory theater in English, to give us our English dramas with the completeness, solidity, and intelligence which mark the production of German plays on Irving Place. He has said that only the acquisition of certain land for his building postponed the undertaking, and he had scheduled for the first year a complete cycle of Shakespeare's plays. What he may do toward fundamentally improving opera it remains. to see. That he could have hastened a revolution in dramatic taste there is no room to doubt. We are ripe for such a change. Never have we been so ripe as now. Give us one theater comparable to the best in Paris, Vienna, or Berlin, and the exclusive reign of standards now dominant on Broadway would meet a speedy end.

That English-speaking peoples have never established the theater as an institution, on the plane of some Continental peoples, is sometimes regarded as part of the price we pay for free government. The Français comes down from the times when absolute monarchy might patronize art after its own choice and pleasure, and in Germany to-day the drama is an encouraged plant, watered by city and State, not a machine existing primarily to coin money, as it is in England and our country. Of all parts of the world to-day Germany stands highest for the excellence of her theaters, and also for the quality of her contemporary playwrights, and these two conditions naturally depend upon each other; the theater helping the dramatists and the dramatists helping the theater. If we had a Sudermann, a Hauptmann, and a dozen such, it would be easier to establish a higher theater system; but, conversely, if we turned the playhouse to better uses we should be more likely to produce our own Sudermann and Hauptmann. Mr. Conried grew up in a land some of whose most distinguished intelligence is put upon the theater. He came to a land of which such an allegation would be comically

untrue. He was an actor, and the actor is educated mainly in the theater, often showing great quickness in extracting what education is possible from his environment. Among us the actor finds but sorry picking. In Germany he acquires a natural intimacy with much of the world's greatest literature and much of the strongest contemporary thought. He not only knows German and foreign classics, but the current plays in which he appears differ in depth and illumination from ours as culture and intelligence differ from vulgarity and nonsense. His repertory sometimes includes several hundred parts, whereas with us the actor may spend three years stalking through a single rôle. The German, moreover, is on the stage one night and at leisure the next; the American repeats his lines night after night, and at two matinées a week, throughout the season. The American has a "line," which is seldom relieved; the German may be a hero one night, a butler the next; he may be the center of the piece or appear for five minutes; he alternates from tragedy to comedy, from "straight" parts to character. The director of his theater is an educated and competent man, who has often gone from literature to his present occupation. The stage managers are also men of education and artistic understanding. Such being the atmosphere in which his mind and talents grow, it is no wonder that a German by no means exceptional as an actor frequently develops into a manager of distinction.

Such was Mr. Conried's evolution. Not more than fair as an actor, his career upon the stage was an admirable preparation for management, toward which he showed an early predilection, his nature being more executive than histrionic. Since he has been in charge of the Irving Place Theater he has lived up to his German traditions as far as circumstances allowed. That theater has not meant much to multitudes, but it has been a light in a dark place; it has encouraged and stimulated lovers of the drama; it has made it possible for them to judge of the divergence between the American stage and what the stage ought to be; and thus, although inconspicuous, it has shone like "a good deed in a naughty

world." The number of Americans who could draw inspiration there has been liinited, of course, by the language; but even through that barrier it has influenced enough to make it a leader among the modest forces that are gathering to overthrow the empty vulgarity of our stage. In conducting it Mr. Conried has met problems which would not exist in Germany, first among them the effect of American life upon the rising generation of Germans, who have proved of more frivolous preferences than their parents, and have either wandered over to Broadway or supported farces on Irving Place much more willingly than Schiller. In Germany theaters are devoted to one kind of drama or another, a division almost as essential as the separation between grand and comic opera, or between hand organs and symphony orchestras. There being in New York but one German theater of importance, and comparatively few Germans of the kind who are the higher drama's chief support, it was necessary to combine in Irving Place elements which would in Germany have been found in separate theaters. To keep alive, among such difficulties, a theater so far above the New York level, required a man astute in affairs as well as in art, and Mr. Conried's purely business ability is ample. He has a head for figures, and well knows the difference between a possibility and a dream. He knows how much an actor is worth, and how much can be spent for scenery on any given play, and he obtains his dramas on very reasonable terms. More significant still, of the practical side of him, is his invention of a business which has kept him in pecuniary comfort while requiring almost none of his attention or of his capital. We have all been furnished with chairs on our Atlantic voyages by the Ocean Steamship Chair Company at $1 per voyage, but few of us have suspected that this scheme originated in the brain of Mr. Conried, or that the entire enterprise was carried on at odd moments in the office of the theater, without extra assistance, so simple was the plan. It has been so lucrative that rivals have sprung into existence, but the first company in the