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Music from the South. 105 |
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field of inventive or imaginative enterprise be explored—monotony and piquancy.
Let me illustrate for a moment from French art in other forms than that of music.
To begin with drama : there is nothing so monotonous as all the rules of serious French tragedy— nothing so piquant, so provocative of intellectual curiosity, as the working-out of the same, by those who have to present it. Consider the tirades of Corneille and his successors, which, grand as they are, are rhymed—in a rhyme neither to be broken nor bent.
Yet tradition tells us in what measure Clairon,—-and memory reminds my predecessors how Talma, —and personal experience has acquainted me by what sinister insinuations Rachel, pointed such monotony by a lacerating finesse of accent sufficient to carry off the platitude of the verse, and its deficiency in idea, and to support the situation of the scene.
I have found the same union of the same two separate elements in French painting. While the artists have shrunk from no subject, the similarity of expression in their elder pictures has always struck me. Till such romanticists as Gericault with |
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