"Was that the question?" he returned. "I thought it was whether Italian
opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land."

"Well, make it that," we responded, tolerantly.

"Oh no," he met us half-way. "But it naturalizes itself everywhere. They
have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly
in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice and Naples,
or as here in New York, where everything is so much at home, or so
little. It's the most universal form of art."

"Is it? Why more so than sculpture or painting or architecture?"

Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: "I think it is more
immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time
to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first
authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for
them to begin their universal life. It seems different with operas.
'Cavalleria Rusticana' was as much at home with us in its first year as
'L'Elisir d'Amore' is now in its sixtieth or seventieth."

"But it isn't," we protested, "denationalized. What can be more
intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?"

"You're right," the reader owned, as the reader always must, if honest,
in dealing with the writer. "It is the operatic audience, not the opera,
which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We are all
Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in our native land,
listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past."

* * * * *

The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed and murmured
and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of the
conversation, if it could have been tested, would have been found
voluntary rather than spontaneous; but the sound was gay, and there
could be no question of the splendor of the sight. We may decry our own
almost as much as we please, but there is a point where we must cease to
depreciate ourselves; even for the sake of evincing our superiority to
our possessions, we must not undervalue some of them. One of these is
the Metropolitan Opera House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity of
fashion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of music fill its
mighty cup to the brim in the proportions that they bear to one another
in the community. Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we surely
realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjectively th