Thither all the country goes at times. Restless, fitful, changing,
yet still the same in its change; like the waves of the sea, that toss and
roll and move away, and still the mighty mass is ever there. New York, in
its various phases and developments, its crowded and cosmopolitan
population, its out-door kaleidoscopic splendor, is indeed a representative
of the entire country. It has not the purely literary life of Boston, nor
so distinctive an intellectual character; it is not so stamped by the
impress of olden times as Philadelphia; but it has an outside garb
significant of the inward nature. It is like the face of a great actor,
splendid in expression, full of character, changing with a thousand
changing emotions, but betraying a great soul beneath them all. New York is
artistic just as America is artistic, just as the age is artistic: not,
perhaps, in the loftiest or most refined sense, but in the sense that art
is an expression, in tangible form, of ideas. New York is a great thought
uttered. It is like those fruits or seeds which germinate by turning
themselves inside out; the soul is on the outside, crusted all over it, but
none the less soul for all that.
And New York illustrates this idea of the drama being the representative
art of to-day. The theatre there, including the opera, is a great
established fact,--as important nearly as it was in the palmiest days of
the Athenian republic, or on the road to be of as much consequence as it is
in Paris, the representative city of the world.
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