English Opera

Extract

The most ardent patriot could hardly contend that the history of English Opera has been a glorious record; but the most captious critic must admit that that record has at least been intensely English. It has been a continuous—no, a very discontinuous—record of amateurishness and “muddling through somehow,” and it is well known that these are the characteristics of our English attitude to life in general. Our national temperament does not incline us to be positively proud of them, but we are certainly well contented with them, and there seems every probability that we shall continue for the rest of our national existence to take them for granted as our instinctive guiding principles, if indeed we are ever conscious of proceeding on principles at all.