New York is, perhaps, more of a representative city than any other in the land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive, individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a focus. Thither all the country goes at times. Restless, fitful, changing, yet still the same in its change; like the waves of the sea, that toss and roll and move away, and still the mighty mass is ever there. New York, in its various phases and developments, its crowded and cosmopolitan population, its out-door kaleidoscopic splendor, is indeed a representative of the entire country. It has not the purely literary life of Boston, nor so distinctive an intellectual character; it is not so stamped by the impress of olden times as Philadelphia; but it has an outside garb significant of the inward nature. It is like the face of a great actor, splendid in expression, full of character, changing with a thousand changing emotions, but betraying a great soul beneath them all. New York is artistic just as America is artistic, just as the age is artistic: not, perhaps, in the loftiest or most refined sense, but in the sense that art is an expression, in tangible form, of ideas. New York is a great thought uttered. It is like those fruits or seeds which germinate by turning themselves inside out; the soul is on the outside, crusted all over it, but none the less soul for all that.
And New York illustrates this idea of the drama being the representative art of to-day. The theatre there, including the opera, is a great established fact,--as important nearly as it was in the palmiest days of the Athenian republic, or on the road to be of as much consequence as it is in Paris, the representative city of the world. Fifty thousand people nightly crowd twenty different theatres in New York. From the splendid halls where Grisi and Gazzaniga and La Borde and La Grange have by turns translated into sound the ideas of Meyerbeer and Bellini and Donizetti and Mozart, to the little rooms where sixpenny tickets procure lager-beer as well as music for the purchaser, the drama is worshipped. And this not only by New-Yorkers: not only do those who lead the busy, excited life of the metropolis acquire a taste, as some might say, for a factitious excitement, but all strangers hasten to the theatres. The sober farmer, the citizens from plodding interior towns, the gay Southerners, accustomed almost exclusively to social amusements, the denizens of rival Bostons and Philadelphias all frequent the operas and playhouses of New York. When the richer portion of its inhabitants have left the hot and sultry town, or, in mid-winter, are immersed in the more exclusive pleasures of fashionable life, even then the theatres are thronged; and in September and October you shall find all parts of the country represented in their boxes and parquets,--proving that this is not an exclusively metropolitan taste, that it is shared by the whole nation, that in this also New York is truly representative.