Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1030

966 mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not only all we need but all we can endure in any one example of art."

"You are lucky if you get so much," we said, "even at a vaudeville show."

"Or at an opera," he returned, and then the curtain rose on the second act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence. "What should you say was the supreme moment of this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed from Adina; when he bursts into that joyous song of liberation, and gives that delightful caper—

and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference, and breaks into the lyrical lament—

she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to love by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled. The rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other conditions the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it without the interposition of anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other souls, and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then it must have been rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?"

"We never bet," we virtuously replied. "We are principled against it in all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could never settle it. for both composer and librettist are dead."

"Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world that needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is so indiscriminate," the reader thoughtfully observed.

"But aren't you," we asked, "getting rather far away from the question whether the pleasure of experience isn't greater than the pleasure of inexperience; whether later operas don't give more joy than the first?"

"Was that the question?" he returned. "I thought it was whether Italian opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land."

"Well, make it that," we responded tolerantly.

"Oh, no," he met us half-way. "But it naturalizes itself everywhere. They have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan, and Venice and Naples, or as here in New York, where everything is so much at home, or so little. It's the most universal form of art."

"Is it? Why more so than sculpture, or painting, or architecture?"

Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: "I think it is more immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for them to begin their universal life. It seems different with opera. Cavalleria Rusticana was as much at home with us in its first year as L'Elisir d'Amore is now in its sixtieth or seventieth."

"But it isn't," we protested, "denationalized. What can be more intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?"

"You're right," the reader owned, as the reader always must, if honest, in dealing with the writer. "It is the operatic audience, not the opera which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We are all Italians here, to-night. I only wish we were in our native land, listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past."

The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed, and murmured and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of the conversation, if it could have been tested, would