article on Moral and Political Science, which, if M. Janin had not been deterred by the subject from perusing it, might have enlightened even that "tenébreuse affaire," his muddled wit.

Apropos of a debate on M. Vattemare's projects, in the Institute of France, the

Revue says: "America, as M. Guizot declares, contrary to the common opinion, has been the theatre of the most remarkable, the most energetic, the most fruitful intellectual movement which has been offered to our admiration in these latter days."

To turn from Rachel to the opera is like passing from Rome to Naples. And far be it from us to say that the transition is without its charms! In building up, not the being that we are, but the being that we aim to be, the sweeter influences of art are as important as the sterner; the delicious grace of painting can no more be spared than the solemn majesty of sculpture. Rossini and Mozart have as much, at least, to teach us, as Corneille and Racine.

In the earlier part of the season we had some fears for the success of the opera. These fears, we rejoice to say, are rapidly vanishing. If the season of 1855-6 be not a marked and memorable one, we have reason now to hope that it will, at least, be delightful and satisfactory. Certainly, if this result can be achieved by energy and enterprise in the management, it will be secured. Mr. Paine has determined to give us a galaxy rather than a comet; to please the large public who desire enjoyment, rather than the musical astronomers who desire discoveries. This is a wise determination, and we trust it may be appreciated and rewarded. It is infinitely more desirable, for the interests of art, that we should have fine works thoroughly performed in all their parts, than that we should have a marvel or two flaming out from a background of mediocrity. After a series of tentative nights, Mr. Paine celebrated the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by the production of Le Prophète. Great pains had been taken with the mise en scène, the parts had been distributed as well as they could be, the rehearsals had been carefully managed, and we all anticipated a magnificent presentation of this most magnificent of operas. We were not entirely disappointed: the singers exerted themselves handsomely; Allegri had done his best (and nobody's best is better); the orchestra was in good training; the ballet

was well danced, and, with a little more ready enthusiasm on the part of the audience, the first night of the Prophète would have been creditably brilliant.

We wonder if people in general reflect how much the hearer is responsible for what he hears; how much the splendor of oratory, the truth of acting, the beauty of singing, depend upon the atmosphere which the audience create for themselves? It is not only the "jest's prosperity" which is in the ear of him that hears it." If an audience be quick of appreciation, sympathetic, ready to be pleased, and swiftly conscious of pleasure, a certain subtle magnetism diffuses itself through the very air, which gives to the performer a kind of sudden inspiration, a glow of courage, a warm ambition, and eagerness to achieve.

Is it our habitual deference to the will of the majority which makes our audiences so generally slow to manifest their emotions? It is droll, sometimes, to watch individuals at a place of amusement; to see how a man, with a light of satisfaction in his face, and a kind of aurora of applause dawning over his whole person, will turn, half unconsciously, to the right or the left, catch the influence of his neighbours, and bring his white kids vehemently together, just an imperceptible second after a dozen other pairs have begun to smite aloud their wearers' joy.

Perhaps, however, we ought not to attribute the comparative coldness with which the efforts of the Academy troupe were received, on the first night of Le Prophète, wholly to our national ways.

The spectacle of this opera is so elaborate that it could hardly have been expected to move on with perfect smoothness at once, despite many rehearsals, for a rehearsal, after all, is not a performance. How many a hapless orator has "fulmined," like Demosthenes, over the chairs in his study, only to find himself "roaring

like a sucking-dove" when he came face to face with the reality of the "fierce democracy!"

Then, too, the music of the Prophète is not of a kind to take the natural sympathies of an audience by storm.

M. Meyerbeer is, unquestionably, the most worthy and gifted of living composers (for Rossini, though he still lives after a fashion of his own, has ceased to compose), and he has written much which the world will not willingly let die. But though the genius of Meyerbeer is masculine, vigorous, and sincere, it lacks, we think, some of the richest qualities, and, above all, that quality of intensity which carries an artist immediately to the hearts of men. Meyerbeer always seems to us to think almost as much of his art as of his results, and he is constantly tempted out of his immediate way by pleasant little vistas of artistic effect. "When a general," said Napoleon, "sets out to take Vienna, let him go straight to the mark and take Vienna." Meyerbeer constantly dashes off the road to his conquest, after a chance engagement which promises him the spoil of a standard or two. This habit makes it difficult for a public, not made up of virtuosi, to enter at once, and fully, into the results of his compositions.

How much, for instance, is taken away from the effect of that rich and impressive recitative in the second act of the Prophète, "Sotto le vaste arcate," in which the Prophet relates his dream to the Anabaptists, by the too elaborate finish of its modulations, and by the consummate elegance and scientific wealth of the accompaniment! the vision of portentous meaning vanishes, while we are wondering how the violins will run through their ingenious combinations! In the same way, Meyerbeer has damaged one of the finest dramatic situtions in the whole opera-that of the scene in which Bertha, disguised as a pilgrim, meets Fides in her beggary, on the great square of Munster.

Meyerbeer, moreover, will not write an overture; and how much of the first effect of an opera is sacrificed with the overture! A great overture, such as those of Der Freischütz, Don Giovanni, Semiramide, is as essential to a great opera as an exordium to a great poem.

Yet the Prophète is so full of fine things, it has such a grand general unity of char

acter, it is so splendid an example of the combination of diverse arts to produce a sublime, artistic harmony, that it must hold the public whom it once wins. Unluckily, it did not win our public.

As we said before, the mise en scène at the Academy was very handsome. Allegri's effects of distance and atmosphere in landscape are always pleasant, his architectural scenes always striking; and he put forth all his powers in the Prophète. The corps of subordinates was large enough to give character to the procession; and the scene of the Coronation, with its accompanying symphonic march, so full of stately beauty. was really grand and imposing. The parts were well filled. Mme. Lagrange rendered the rôle of Fides with dignity and feeling, and sang her music in perfect taste and with fine effect. Miss Hensler had no great opportunity to develope her talent in the part of Bertha, which had been much cut down to bring the opera within the limits of our American patience, but she showed herself a growing actress; and both in voice and method filled the part far more satisfactorily than Mme. Castellan, the original Bertha of the Grand Opera, whose shrill soprano and uncertain vocalization detracted not a little from the perfection of those superb representations, the fame of which went forth, in 1849, to the ends of the musical earth. The tenor, Salviani, has a good method, particularly in recitative, and sang with care and taste; but he lacks the fire and the pathos which are required to do justice to the rôle of the Prophet. This inadequacy was particularly apparent in the invocations, hymns, and psalms of religious exultation with which the third act closes, and which are among the grandest compositions in their kind of this century. Amodio made a good Seignorial Oberthal, and the Anabaptists were adequately represented. That, with all this fidelity in the production, Le Prophète should have been so soon withdrawn, is hardly creditable to us.

Let us resolve to give the Huguenots a warmer welcome; to like it more, and to like it longer.

And, while we are in the mood of discussing our duty to the arts and to our own higher culture, why should we not say an angry word or two about the lingering way in which New York is making up its mind to secure Dr. Abbott's extraor

dinary collection of Egyptian antiquities?

There, in the Stuyvesant Institute, huddled into a few small rooms, is a collection, excellently illustrative of the birth of all the arts that adorn and dignify life—a

collection not less interesting than instructive, the presence of which, in our city, ought to bring us honor. And yet, if something be not speedily done, this very collection will bring a kind of shame upon

us.

FINE

It was but the other day that M. Guizot, before the Institute of France, defended our country and its government from the charge of gross materialism and merely commercial activity, in a manner which was the more generous and just, that it compromised the soundness of views put forth by himself long ago in reference to democracy and the higher culture of man. And one of his main proofs of our being superior to the beasts that perish, was the number of public libraries established by private enterprise in our country. That number is very large, and the establishment of them a real and brilliant jewel in the crown of our glory.

And now here, in New York, the chance is offered us of securing, for no more than fifty or sixty thousand dollars (three or four city officials would waste twice as much in a year and never think of it), a museum, at least as instructive as a library --a collection, gathered in twenty years of assiduous and scientific industry, by an accomplished Egyptian scholar, of all that is most needed to throw light upon the land from whose sides went forth religion and the arts, upon the Egypt of Moses and the Israelites, upon the school of letters and science, aye, and of beauty, too, to which the genius of Greece owed more than can easily be estimated.

We are trying now, in many ways, to make New York a really great and brilliant city, a city demanding more than a paragraph of "Pop-so much—and exports so much" in the gazetteers, and in the thoughts of men. We wish to gather here all the resources by which the human faculties can be developed, all the ornaments which become the majestic metropolis of a mighty people. In this Egyptian collection, we have the nucleus offered us of such a magnificent museum as every capital of Europe has for years been building up. Dr. Abbott would find the Old World glad to give him twice the sum, for the

ARTS.

scattered articles, which he asks of us for the complete whole. The Royal Museums of Berlin and Turin have already competed for the possession of uniques which are wanting to their splendid collections.

A number of our citizens have advanced nearly half the purchase money. Only about thirty thousand dollars are still needed. Can they not be had? We are constantly told of the intelligence of our people at large. Here is an opportunity for the display of it. Let the men of moderate means contribute now, each in his measure, to secure this opportunity, which, now lost, may never again recur, and the Americans of 1956 will remember their ancestors of to-day with a pride as enlightened and as just as that with which we look back to the men who, hardly landed on the rugged New England soil, gave of their substance to found schools for the mind, almost before they had sowed the seed corn for the body's perishable food. We shall recur to this subject again; but now we urge it upon our readers to hasten to the Stuyvesant Institute, and see that this good work is done thoroughly and at

once.

Then they may go, and, without being ashamed, may look upon Delaroche's splendid picture of the great artists whom Europe delights to honor. Let them reflect that it is by the magic of the works of such as these, that the great cities of the Old World have been made the centres of magnetic power that they are; and so resolve that we, too, shall have our "Hemicycle des Beaux Arts!"

The Messrs. Goupil, who had already made the print of this great fresco known to us, have done well in bringing over this admirable reduced painting of it, from the artist's own hand. Well, too, have the Messrs. Williams done, in bringing us Mr. Faed's two new and delightful pictures of Shakespeare and of Milton.

Everybody knows how faithful and fine

a draughtsman Mr. Faed is, how delicate and wholesome is his sentiment, how natural his color. He has conceived the excellent design of a series of ideal pictures of the great men of our English literature, of the men whom we all love, who, though dead, live with us, are our friends, counselors, comforters, whose genius warms us like the sun, and wakens all our better nature into life.

These pictures are of the series.

They are perfectly simple in conception. There, in one, sits Shakespeare, picturesque in the rich, black Elizabethan dress. His dress is picturesque, his great oaken table is picturesquely carved-these things are of the time. Of the time, too, is that drapery which Paul Veronese would not have disowned.

But those few folios, carelessly scattered on the floor-that dusty little book-casethe room that, we will wager, was never "set to rights"-these are of the man as history hints his life in London, as imagination conjures him up-not much given to study, and blotting never a wordbringing in his argosies of thought from street and lane, and unlading them in thriftless haste.

And the face-the honest portrait bust of Stratford well idealized-is it not, after all, as likely to be our Shakespeare as any face we have? The beard, the pose, the costume-these idealize the air; but how strong is the honest nationality of the features! The English Shakespeare is there as plainly as the Frenchman in that exquisitely drawn figure of Jean Goujon, the sculptor, which is so prominent in

Delaroche's Hemicycle. The disposition of the lights, the modeling of the figure, the handling of substance, the fidelity of details-these we examine slowly, and at our leisure, and only to prolong the plea sure which we find at first.

From Shakespeare-the ideal of health, and warmth, and exuberant life—we turn to Milton. After the glowing noon comes the melancholy twilight. Through the vine-trellises that shade the window of that tasteful, simple room, we catch glimpses of the rural beauty of Bunhill Fields. Dimness is gathering over the lovely landscape. Alas! a heavier cloud has settled upon those once glorious orbs that looked upon the "sapphire blaze" of heaven! Still, their lustre lingers; but now they are as crystals flinging back the sun, not as diamonds glowing with an inward light! The red furrows of darkness mark the beauteous lids, and the anxious lines of blindness are traced in all that sweet and solemn face.

But how grand is the repose of those majestic features! how dignified the grace of that musing figure! how lovely still those flowing ringlets-the poet's crown and garland, untouched by Puritan scissors!

These interesting pictures are to be eagraved by the skillful hand of the artist's brother, the same hand to which we owe the exquisite engraving of Evangeline, which so many have desired after admiring it in the etching, and which all will admire now that they can contemplate its pensive beauty in all the perfection which the burin can give to outline and to chiaros

curo.

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