air out of our keeping from the first moment,
when, after passing through the crowd arriving from the snowy street, we
found our way through the distracted vestibule of the opera-house into
the concentred auditorium and hushed ourselves in the presence of the
glowing spectacle of the stage. "Ah, this is the real thing," he
whispered, and he would not let us, at any moment when we could have
done so without molesting our neighbors, censure the introduction of
Alpine architecture in the entourage of an Italian village piazza. "It
is a village at the foot of the Alps probably," he said, "and if not, no
matter. It is as really the thing as all the rest: as the chorus of
peasants and soldiers, of men and women who impartially accompany the
orchestra in the differing sentiments of the occasion; as the rivals who
vie with one another in recitative and aria; as the heroine who holds
them both in a passion of suspense while she weaves the enchantment of
her trills and runs about them; as the whole circumstance of the
divinely impossible thing which defies nature and triumphs over
prostrate probability. What does a little Swiss Gothic matter? The thing
is always opera, and it is always Italy. I was thinking, as we crowded
in there from the outside, with our lives in our hands, through all
those trolleys and autos and carriages and cabs and sidewalk
ticket-brokers, of the first time I saw this piece. It was in Venice,
forty-odd years ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a gondola, slipping
to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier's oar that was both
impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the sea-weedy, slippery steps
by a beggar whom age and sorrow had bowed to just the right angle for
supporting my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The blackness of the tide
was pierced with the red plunge of a few lamps, and it gurgled and
chuckled as my gondola lurched off and gave way to another; and when I
got to my box--a box was two florins, but I could afford it--I looked
down on just this scene, over a pit full of Austrian officers and
soldiers, and round on a few Venetians darkling in the other boxes and
half-heartedly enjoying the music. It was the most hopeless hour of the
Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy with its oppression and
tobacco, for the officers smoked between the acts. It was only the more
intensely Italian for that; but it was not more Italian than this; and
when I see those impossible people on the stage, and h