This speaks to all nations, in all
languages. No writer, though he write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
Lamartine, or Dudevant, can hope for such an audience as Verdi or
Meyerbeer. No orator speaks to such crowds as Rossini; no Everett or
Kossuth, or Gavazzi or Spurgeon, has so many listeners as Donizetti. For
the stage is the art of to-day,--perhaps more especially, but still not,
exclusively, the operatic stage; the theatre in its various forms
represents the feeling of the time so as Grecian and Gothic architecture
and Italian painting have in their time done for their time,--so as no
pictures, no architecture, no statuary can now do. Painting and statuary,
when they do anything towards representing this age, incarnate the dramatic
spirit; the literature that has most influence today is journalism,--the
effective, present, actual, short-lived, dramatic newspaper, where all the
actors speak for themselves: other literature has its listeners, but it
lags behind; other art has its appreciators, but it cannot keep pace with
the march of armies, with the rush to California, with the swarm to
Australia; there is no art on these outskirts but the dramatic. That
travels with the advancing mass in every exodus; that went with Dr. Kane to
the North Pole (he had private theatricals aboard the Resolute); that alone
gave utterance immediately to the latest cry of humanity in the Italian
War.
Neither can it be said that the theatre has no more consequence now than it
has always enjoyed.
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