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Music from the South. 87 |
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majority of the fairy tales collected by Straparola. I hey belong to outlying worlds of fancy, in which nationality has small part.
To look at another side of the subject, it may be observed that whenever Southern influences have leavened the literature and art of any given country, the same communicated torpor in regard to picÂturesque, as distinguished from classical and academical imagery, is to be remarked. Wordsworth, intense in his love for nature, and consummate in his knowledge of the subject, pointed out how, during a long period, our world of poetry suffered from the domination of foreign fashions, imported from among a people who, while loud in complaint of the harsh glooms of our northern climate, religiously bar out the summer sun, turning noon into sleepy night, and shrink from exertion or fatigue in search of natural beauty. But when Wordsworth indicated with a discriminating hand the time of awakening in English literature to the minute observation of nature, he would have been more correct had he described it as a time of revival; seeing that the faculty so sparingly diffused among the Italians is confessed in the works of all our great poets. If Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, |
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