This article, then, expresses my conviction that the average American man or woman is potentially musical. I believe the world of music to be a true democracy. I am convinced that our chief need is to make music ourselves. I believe that under right conditions we should enjoy doing so; I think all art is closely related to the sum of human consciousness. And just as I see great music based on what we are and what we feel, so I see the expert performance of music as being merely our own performance magnified and beautified by extreme skill. I see, in short, a necessary and natural connection between ourselves and both composer and performer. I believe that all the great pictures and sculpture and music lay first in the general consciousness and then became articulate in one man. I believe no statesman, no philosopher, no, not even a Christ, to be conceivable save as he lies first in men’s hearts. What they are _in posse_ he is _in esse_. That we all are more musical than we are thought to be; that we are more musical than we get the chance to be--of this there is no doubt whatever.
The form of drama with music which we loosely call “opera” is such a curious mixture of many elements--some of them closely related, others nearly irreconcilable--that it is almost impossible to arrive at any definite idea of its artistic value. A great picture or piece of sculpture, a great book or a great symphony represents a perfectly clear evolution of a well-defined art. You do not question the artistic validity of “Pendennis” or of a portrait by Romney; they have their roots in the earlier works of great writers and painters and they tend toward those which follow. The arts they represent grew by a slow process of evolution, absorbing everything that was useful to them and rejecting everything useless, until they finally became consistent and self-contained. The development of opera, on the other hand, has been a continual compromise--with the whims of princes, with the even more wayward whims of singers, and with social conventions.
Its increasing costliness (due sometimes to the composer’s grandiloquence and sometimes to the demands of the public) has necessitated producing it in huge opera houses entirely unsuited to it; and, being a mixed art, it has been subject to two different influences which have not by any means always been in agreement. Its life-line has been crossed over and over again by daring innovators who, forgetting the past, have sought to force it away from nature and to make it an expression of excessive individualism. Methods which would find oblivion quickly enough in any pure form of art have been carried out in opera, and have been supported by an uncritical public pleased by a gorgeous spectacle or entertained by fine singing. All the other art-forms progress step by step; opera leaps first forward, then backward; it becomes too reasonable, only to become immediately afterward entirely unreasonable; it passes from objectivity to subjectivity and back again, or employs both at the same time; it turns a man into a woman, or a woman into a man; it thinks nothing of being presented in two languages at once; it turns colloquial Bret Harte into Italian without the slightest realization of having become, in the process, essentially comic: in short, there seems no limit to the havoc it can play with geography, science, language, costume, drama, music, and human nature itself.
