VII

In youth, as at the opera, everything seems possible.  Surely it is not necessary to choose between love and riches.  One may have both, and the one all the more easily for having attained the other.  It must be a fiction of the moralists who construct the dramas that the god of love and the god of money each claims an undivided allegiance.  It was in some wholly legendary, perhaps spiritual, world that it was necessary to renounce love to gain the Rhine gold.  The boxes at the Metropolitan did not believe this.  The spectators of the boxes could believe it still less.  For was not beauty there seen shining in jewels that have a market value, and did not love visibly preside over the union, and make it known that his sweetest favors go with a prosperous world?  And yet, is the charm of life somewhat depending upon a sense of its fleetingness, of its phantasmagorial character, a note of coming disaster, maybe, in the midst of its most seductive pageantry, in the whirl and glitter and hurry of it?  Is there some subtle sense of exquisite satisfaction in snatching the sweet moments of life out of the very delirium of it, that must soon end in an awakening to bankruptcy of the affections, and the dreadful loss of illusions?  Else why do we take pleasure—­a pleasure so deep that it touches the heart like melancholy—­in the common drama of the opera?  How gay and joyous is the beginning!  Mirth, hilarity, entrancing sound, brilliant color, the note of a trumpet calling to heroism, the beseeching of the concordant strings, and the soft flute inviting to pleasure; scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted love, the dance on the green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets, the court, the ball, the mad splendor of life.  And then love becomes passion, and passion thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the heights of the immortal, sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths of despair.  In vain the orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life, warns and pleads and admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone; there is no sweetness now but in the wildness of surrender and of sacrifice.  How sad are the remembered strains that aforetime were incentives to love and promises of happiness!  Gloom settles upon the scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door.  There is a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the passing-bell.  Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled and tired pass into Valhalla.

Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest enjoyment?  Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward, with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine gold?