eat the summers of the
farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous substance as if it
were mere mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not only all we need, but
all we can endure in any one example of art."

"You are lucky if you get so much," we said, "even at a vaudeville
show."

"Or at an opera," he returned, and then the curtain rose on the second
act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been interrupted in
the middle of a sentence. "What should you say was the supreme moment of
this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course,
it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed
from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and gives
that delightful caper

'Which signifies indifference, indifference,
Which signifies indifference,'

and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of
claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference and breaks
into the lyrical lament

'Neppur mi guarda!'

she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to love
by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled. The
rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other conditions
the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it without the
interposition of anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as
there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other
souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I
should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt
itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of
release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then it must have been
rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old,
worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?"

"We never bet," we virtuously replied. "We are principled against it in
all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could
never settle it, for both composer and librettist are dead."

"Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world that
needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is so
indiscriminate," the reader thoughtfully observed.

"But aren't you," we asked, "getting rather far away from the question
whether the pleasure of experience isn't greater than the pleasure of
inexperience--whether later operas don't give more joy than the first?"