public at large have been won by productions which seem to touch the
lowest imaginable point of artistic imbecility; and the
ever-increasing interest in musical drama that is manifested year
after year by London audiences shows that higher motives than those
referred to weigh even with Englishmen. The theory above mentioned
will not hold water, for there are, as a matter of fact, only two ways
of looking at opera: either as a means, whether expensive or not, of
passing an evening with a very little intellectual trouble, some
social _éclat_, and a certain amount of pleasure, or as a form of art,
making serious and justifiable claims on the attention of rational
people. These claims of opera are perhaps more widely recognised in
England than they were some years ago; but there are still a certain
number of persons, and among them not a few musical people, who
hesitate to give opera a place beside what is usually called
'abstract' music. Music's highest dignity is, no doubt, reached when
it is self-sufficient, when its powers are exerted upon its own
creations, entirely without dependence upon predetermined emotions
calling for illustration, and when the interest of the composition as
well as the material is conveyed exclusively in terms of music. But
the function of music in expressing those sides of human emotion which
lie too deep for verbal utterance, a function of which the gradual
recognition led on to the invention of opera, is one that cannot be
slighted or ignored; in it lies a power of appeal to feeling that no
words can reach, and a very wonderful definiteness in conveying exact
shades of emotional sensation. Not that it can of itself suggest the
direction in which the emotions are to be worked upon; but this
direction once given from outside, whether by a 'programme' read by
the listener or by the action and accessories of the stage, the force
of feeling can be conveyed with overwhelming power, and the whole
gamut of emotion, from the subtlest hint or foreshadowing to the fury