I do not wish to suggest that the rest of the people there were like me, for, indeed, they were not.  Whether it was that they naturally liked that noise, or whether it was that they had learned to like it by getting used to it, I did not at the time know; but they did like—­this was plain enough.  While it was going on they sat and looked as rapt and grateful as cats do when one strokes their backs; and whenever the curtain fell they rose to their feet, in one solid mighty multitude, and the air was snowed thick with waving handkerchiefs, and hurricanes of applause swept the place.  This was not comprehensible to me.  Of course, there were many people there who were not under compulsion to stay; yet the tiers were as full at the close as they had been at the beginning.  This showed that the people liked it.

It was a curious sort of a play.  In the manner of costumes and scenery it was fine and showy enough; but there was not much action.  That is to say, there was not much really done, it was only talked about; and always violently.  It was what one might call a narrative play.  Everybody had a narrative and a grievance, and none were reasonable about it, but all in an offensive and ungovernable state.  There was little of that sort of customary thing where the tenor and the soprano stand down by the footlights, warbling, with blended voices, and keep holding out their arms toward each other and drawing them back and spreading both hands over first one breast and then the other with a shake and a pressure—­no, it was every rioter for himself and no blending.  Each sang his indictive narrative in turn, accompanied by the whole orchestra of sixty instruments, and when this had continued for some time, and one was hoping they might come to an understanding and modify the noise, a great chorus composed entirely of maniacs would suddenly break forth, and then during two minutes, and sometimes three, I lived over again all that I suffered the time the orphan asylum burned down.

We only had one brief little season of heaven and heaven’s sweet ecstasy and peace during all this long and diligent and acrimonious reproduction of the other place.  This was while a gorgeous procession of people marched around and around, in the third act, and sang the Wedding Chorus.  To my untutored ear that was music—­almost divine music.  While my seared soul was steeped in the healing balm of those gracious sounds, it seemed to me that I could almost resuffer the torments which had gone before, in order to be so healed again.  There is where the deep ingenuity of the operatic idea is betrayed.  It deals so largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously augmented by the contrasts.  A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.