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There should have been a larger audience at last night's performance of Smetana's delectable comedy, "The Bartered Bride"; for the work is not only a masterpiece of human and gayety and beauty, too often and too long neglected in America, but the Metropolitan's current production of it is one of the most pleasurable exhibitions in the repertoire of the house.

The home-staying or home-visiting Christmas diners were no doubt rewardingly occupied, but a quite perfect way to spend Christmas would be to dine deliberately at midday and sit before "The Bartered Bride" from eight-thirty to eleven, with Smetana's prismatic folk-dance and gorgeous drolleries and riant, lovely tunes to end the day in right, luxurious content.

Especially are the absentees to be commiserated when one reflects upon the various satisfactions that the Metropolitan's performance of this work affords. The production is substantially that of the Metropolitan's "popular" Spring season, with larger choruses and better orchestra, giving us again the salient and delightful features of that May-time premiere of the work in English upon the Metropolitan's exuberantly polyglot stage.

First and best of all there is the Marie of Miss Muriel Dickson, one of the most enchanting phenomena to be observed this season at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street - or, in fact, on any New York stage. Miss Dickson, as most of us know, is an ex-D'Oyly Cartean. Having adorned that modest but illustrious assemblage for as long a time as she thought fitting, Miss Dickson graciously permitted herself to be translated to the grandest of all grand opera establishments, and is now being groomed by Mr. Johnson, it is whispered, for certain r?les left achingly void by the retirement of Miss Bori.

Where Miss Dickson will proceed from Smetana's Bohemian village is not at the moment appropriate matter for speculation. It is sufficient for the present to say that she brings to her present assignment a singular blend of zest and loveliness. She is the blithe and gracious and most winsome figure for the eye, an actress of rare skill and wit and delicate vitality and resourcefulness. As a singer, she calls upon a voice of engaging purity and freshness, which she uses with the taste of a sensitive musician. She was struggling against a cold last night, but that impediment did not conceal the qualities of the artist - her feeling for the shape and musical meaning of certain phrases in, for example, that First Act aria, whose melodic subject-matter is at times so amusingly suggestive of the Brahms of the E minor Symphony.

Here, and elsewhere in her performance, Miss Dickson set one to thinking of the various possibilities suggested by her entrance into the Metropolitan fold. Certainly she is one of the things which make that enlivened aggregation a fascinating subject for the idly speculative mind.

Aside from Miss Dickson's contribution, one had especial joy last night of its two outstanding characterizations - the famous Kezal of Mr. D'Angelo, whose scandalously intelligible English cussing greatly delighted the audience: and Mr. George Rasely's masterly incarnation of the stuttering nitwit, Wenzel, which is quite the funniest thing in current opera - not counting, of course, the performances of certain ladies and gentlemen of the lyric stage whose specialty is tragic grandeur.

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