ugh a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the
Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at
by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention. It is
absolutely the first condition of the existence of an art that one
shall be prepared to tolerate things ludicrously unlike anything to be
found in real life; and when (for instance) you have swallowed the
camel of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes at all,
it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat of permitting them to
sing in this rather than in that way, when both ways are alike
preposterous. It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian opera, any more
than with the female dress of to-day before my eyes I should insist
that the women who wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I do, that the dress
of ten years ago was not--and could not be--more absurd than the dress
of to-day. The only reasonable objection that can be brought against
Italian opera is that when it is sincere it offers what no one wants,
and that when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not sincere.
I cannot quite understand what this means, but will endeavour to
explain.

Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before
whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the
beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the
opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs
for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and
finally Gluck, with his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical
invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling, and telling
it well, and inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations
where strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs
truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created which
would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of these three
periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for then the form
entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function of the story was to
provide a motive for song after song; so that no one was scandalised
or moved to laughter when the death of the hero was re-enacted because
his death-song pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story
was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext. The
characters wer