Fashionables at an opera regard little the fine harmonies presented. They chatter, flirt, and gossip. The artists feel this neglect and can derive no inspiration from an audience so behaving. Dress, personal ambition and restless activity fill the minds of their hearers, and the divine lesson of high contentment is not learned. Life is full of oracles, sources of delight and instruction which can lift it with a fine inspiration. But in order to profit by the oracles we must listen to them, and not to the noise of the streets. We claim to derive our ideas of beauty from ancient Greece. We should remember that simplicity was a ruling element in Greek art. We shall find it in the structure of their temples, in the perfection of their sculpture, in the stern majesty of their drama, and not less in their immortal philosophy. Greece in time lost her hold upon these great possessions, but they became the property of the human world for all ages. In the literature of Rome, we find traces of the great inheritance. Virgil takes up the tale of Troy where Homer left it. Cicero quotes and expounds Aristotle. The poet Horace, proud of imitating the metres of Greek poetry, preserves also something of its spirit. Let us quote, for example, the ode beginning with this line: "Persicos odi, puer, apparatus," |