And, second, when this singing, which the public dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is irresistible. I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this, however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of beauty in their own minds--although nature surrounds them with it, and imaginative literature is in every library--the stage is a perpetual delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last. These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they embody the essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and Shakespeare divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and while those great dramatists imply the whole of life,--whereas the ordinary play implies nothing,--they do not and cannot present it in its actual and complete continuity. Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny. “What is too silly to be said is sung,” says Voltaire.