"To-morrow. It is long, and I am tired to-day. I have been in the opera, and have too much music in my ears."
"You go a great deal to the opera, Max, and I believe that it is more to see than to hear."
"You are quite right, Maria; I really go to the opera to see the faces of the beautiful Italian women. True, they are pretty enough even outside the theatre, and an investigator into history could, from the ideality of their features, easily trace the influence of the formative[1] arts on the forms of the Italian people. Here Nature has taken back from the artists the capital which she once lent; and lo! it has, in the most enrapturing manner, paid compound interest. The sense of the Beautiful has penetrated all the people; and as the flesh once acted on the spirit, so the spirit now works upon the flesh. And the devotions before those beautiful Madonnas, those lovely altar-pieces, which as Madonnas sink into the soul of the bridegroom while the bride is sensuously impressed by a handsome saint, are not in vain. From such elective affinities a race of human beings has sprung which is even more beautiful than the charming soil on which it springs, or the sunny heaven which flashes round
- ↑ Der Einfluss der bildenden Künste. The fine or cultured arts which shape material and thereby mind. Plastic aits is the usual but less truthful equivalent.
