Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest enjoyment? Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward, with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine gold?
How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper revelation of life would they not have seen! For the world has never assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers of votaries from the pit to the dome. I fancy that even Margaret, whose love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater spectacle as by the less.
It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a box in the second tier--the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a little lull in the hum of conversation.
“I had heard,” Morgan was saying, “that the opera was not acclimated in New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the singers--”
“Perhaps,” said my wife, “that is because they do not know the airs.”
“But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with by the music on the stage.”