We Saw This Group Of Statuary The Last Thing Before
Dinner, After A Most Fatiguing Forenoon Of Sightseeing, When We
Were
both tired and hungry, - a most unpropitious time, certainly, - and yet
it enchanted our whole company; what is more,
It made us all cry - a
fact of which I am not ashamed, yet. But, only the next day, when I
was expressing my admiration to an artist, who is one of the
authorities, and knows all that is proper to be admired, I was met
with, -
"O, you have seen that, have you? Shocking thing! Miserable
taste - miserable!"
"Dear me," said I, with apprehension, "what is the matter with it?"
"0," said he, "melodramatic, melodramatic - terribly so!"
I was so appalled by this word, of whose meaning I had not a very
clear idea, that I dropped the defence at once, and determined to
reconsider my tears. To have been actually made to cry by a thing that
was melodramatic, was a distressing consideration. Seriously, however,
on reconsidering the objection, I see no sense in it. A thing may be
melodramatic, or any other _atic_ that a man pleases; so that it
be strongly suggestive, poetic, pathetic, it has a right to its own
peculiar place in the world of art. If artists had had their way in
the creation of this world, there would have been only two or three
kinds of things in it; the first three or four things that God created
would have been enacted into fixed rules for making all the rest.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 51 of 455
Words from 13203 to 13460
of 120793
