This is all statement: let us have some facts; let us embody our ideas. Do you not call Meyerbeer, with his years of study and effort and application, a worker? Do you not call Verdi, who has produced thirty operas, a worker? Do you not imagine that Turner labored on his splendid pictures? Do you not know how Crawford toiled and spun away his nerves and brain? Have you not heard of the incessant and tremendous attention that for many months Church bestowed on the canvas that of late attracted the admiration of English critics and their Queen? Was Rachel idle? Have these artists not spent the substance of themselves as truly as any of your politicians or your soldiers or your traders? Can you not trace in them the same energy, the same effort, the same determination as in Louis Napoleon, as in Zachary Taylor, as in Stephen Girard? Are not they also representative?
And their works,—for by these shall ye know them,—do they reflect in nothing this fitful, uneasy, yet splendid intensity of to-day? Can you not read in the colors on Turner's canvas, can you not see in the rush of Church's Niagara, can you not hear in the strains of the Traviata, can you not perceive in the tones and looks of Ristori, just what you find in the successful men in other spheres of life? Rothschild's fortune speaks no more plainly than the Robert le Diable; George Sand's novels and Carlyle's histories tell the same story as Kossuth's eloquence and Garibaldi's deeds. The artists are as alive to-day as any in the the world. For, again and again, art is not an outside thing; its professors, its lovers, are not placed outside the world; they are in it and of it as absolutely as the rest. You who think otherwise, remember that Verdi's name six months ago was the watchword of the Italian revolutionists; remember that certain operas are forbidden now to be played in Naples, lest they should arouse the countrymen of Masaniello; remember, or learn, if you did not know, how in New York, last June, all the singers in town offered their services for a benefit to the Italian cause, and all the habitués, late though the season was, crowded to their places to see an opera whose attractiveness had been worn out and whose novelty was nearly gone. You who think that art is an interest unworthy of men who live in the world, that it is a thing apart, what say you to the French, the most actual, the most practical, the most worldly of peoples, and yet the fondest of art in all its phases,—the French, who remembered the statues in the Tuileries amid the massacres of the First Revolution, and spared the architecture of antiquity when they bombarded the city of the Caesars?
Consider, too, the growing love for art in practical America; remark the crowds of newly rich who deck their houses with pictures and busts, even though they cannot always appreciate them; remember that nearly every prominent town in the country has its theatre; that the opera, the most refined luxury of European civilization, considered for long an affectation beyond every other, is relished here as decidedly as in Italy or France. In New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, there are buildings exclusively appropriated to this new form of art, this exotic, expensive amusement. These opera-houses, too, illustrate most aptly the progress of other arts. They are adorned with painting and gilding and carving; they are as sumptuous in accommodation as the palaces of European potentates; they are lighted with a brilliancy that Aladdin's garden never rivalled; they are thronged, with crowds as gayly dressed as those that fill the saloons of Parisian belles; and the singers and actors who interpret the thoughts of mighty foreign masters are the same who delight the Emperor of the French when he pays a visit to the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Orchestras of many instruments discourse most eloquent music, and involuted strains are criticized in learned style, in capitals thousands of miles from the seashore. And there is no appreciation of art in all this! there is no embodiment of the love of the age for material magnificence, there is no poetry incarnated into form, in this combination of splendors rivalling the opium-eater's visions! The Americans are a dull, stupid people, immersed in business; art has no effect upon them; it is despised among them; it can never prosper here!
The stage, indeed, in its various forms, seems more fully to manifest and illustrate the artistic influence among Americans than any other art. It often addresses those whom more refined solicitations might never reach. Those who would turn from Church's or Page's pictures with indifference are frequently attracted by the representations in a theatre. The pictures there are more alive, more real, more intense, and fascinate many unable to appreciate the recondite charms of the canvas. The grace of attitude, the splendid expression, the intellectual art of Ristori or Rachel may impress those who fail to discover the same merits in colder stone, in Crawford's marble or the statues of Palmer; and they may sometimes learn to relish even the delicate beauties of Shakspeare's text, from hearing it fitly declaimed, who would never spell out its meaning by themselves. The drama is certainly superior to other arts while its reign lasts, because of its veriness, its actuality. He must be dull of imagination, indeed, who cannot give himself up for a while to its illusions; he must be stupid who cannot open his senses to its delights or waken his intellect to receive its influences.
Neither can a taste for the stage be declared one which only the ignorant or vulgar share. Though away in the wilds of California a theatre was often erected next after a hotel, the second building in a town, and the strolling player would summon the miners by his trumpet when not one was in sight, and instantly a swarm peeped forth from the earth, like the armed men who sprang from the furrows that Cadmus ploughed,—though the wildest and rudest of Western cities and the wildest and rudest inhabitants of Western towns are quick to acknowledge the charms of the stage,—yet also the most highly cultured and the most intellectual Americans pay the same tribute to this art. We have all seen, within a few years, one of the most profound scholars and most prominent divines in the country proclaiming his approbation of the drama. We may find, to-day, in any Eastern city, members of the liberal clergy at an opera, and sometimes at a play. The scholars and writers and artists and thinkers, as well as the people of leisure and of fashion, frequent places of amusement, not only for amusement, but to cultivate their tastes, to exercise their intellects, ay, and oftentimes to refine their hearts. The splendid homage paid in England not long ago to the drama, when the highest nobility and the first statesmen in the land were present at a banquet in honor of Charles Kean, is evidence enough that no puerile or uncultivated taste is this which relishes the theatre. Goethe presiding over the playhouse at Weimar, Euripides and Sophocles writing tragedies, the greatest genius of the English language acting in his own productions at the Globe Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman and Macready illustrating this art with the resources of their fine intellects and great attainments,—surely these need scarcely be mentioned, to relieve the drama from the reproach that some would put upon it, of puerility.
New York is, perhaps, more of a representative city than any other in the land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive, individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a focus. 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. Fifty thousand people nightly crowd twenty different theatres in New York. From the splendid halls where Grisi and Gazzaniga and La Borde and La Grange have by turns translated into sound the ideas of Meyerbeer and Bellini and Donizetti and Mozart, to the little rooms where sixpenny tickets procure lager-beer as well as music for the purchaser, the drama is worshipped. And this not only by New-Yorkers: not only do those who lead the busy, excited life of the metropolis acquire a taste, as some might say, for a factitious excitement, but all strangers hasten to the theatres. The sober farmer, the citizens from plodding interior towns, the gay Southerners, accustomed almost exclusively to social amusements, the denizens of rival Bostons and Philadelphias all frequent the operas and playhouses of New York. When the richer portion of its inhabitants have left the hot and sultry town, or, in mid-winter, are immersed in the more exclusive pleasures of fashionable life, even then the theatres are thronged; and in September and October you shall find all parts of the country represented in their boxes and parquets,—proving that this is not an exclusively metropolitan taste, that it is shared by the whole nation, that in this also New York is truly representative.
Boston typifies a peculiar phase of American life; it is the illustration, the exponent, of the cultivated side of our nationality; its thought, its action, its character are taken abroad as symbols of the national thought and action and character, in whatever relates to literature or art. The Professor said truly, Boston does really in some sort stand for the brain of America. Well the brain of America appreciates the stage. It is but a few months since the culture and distinction of Boston nightly crowded a small and inferior theatre, to witness the personations of the young genius who is destined at no distant day to rival the proudest names of the drama. The most brilliant successes Edwin Booth has yet achieved have been achieved in Boston; scholars and wits and poets and professors crowd the boxes when he plays; women of talent write poems in his praise and publish them in the "Atlantic Monthly"; professors of Harvard College send him congratulatory letters; artists paint and carve his intellectual beauty; and fashion follows in the wake of intellect, alike acknowledging his merits. Boston recognized those merits, too, when they were first presented to its appreciation; and now that they verge nearer upon maturity, her appreciation is quickened and her applause redoubled. It cannot be said that the taste or culture of the nation is indifferent to histrionic excellence, when absolute excellence is found.
No other art is yet on such a footing among us. Neither is this because of our partially developed civilization. It is equally so abroad; where the nations are oldest and best established in culture, there, too, a similar state of things exists. No school in painting, no style of sculpture, no kind of architecture has made such an impression on the age as its music, as its dramatic music, its opera. 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. At the time when Gothic architects and Italian painters expressed the meaning of their own ages, there was nothing like a real drama in existence, and the Roman theatre was never comparable with ours. The Greeks, indeed, had a stage which was an important element of their civilization, and which took the character of their time, giving and receiving influence; but their stage was essentially different from that of the moderns. Its success did not depend upon the individual performer; its pageantry was perhaps as splendid as what we now see; but the play of the countenance, that great intellectual opportunity offered an actor by our drama, was not known. In this see also a characteristic of the present age. Individuality is a distinctive peculiarity of the nineteenth century; it has been for centuries gradually becoming more possible; but every man now works his own way, acts himself, more completely than ever before. Therefore appropriate is it that the drama should give importance to the individual, and allow a great actor to incarnate and illustrate in his own form and face feelings and passions that formerly were only hinted at; for remember that the Greek players usually wore masks, while their amphitheatres were so large that in any event the expression of the features was lost.