Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or
indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the
central identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a
vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and
introverted amid all its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting
song of a grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise,
to outside life and landscape, (returning mainly to the antique
feeling,) real sun and gale, and woods and shores--to the elements
themselves--not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a
good tale of them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above
style or polish--a feature not absent at any time, but now first
brought to the fore--gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its
born sister, music, already responds to the same influences. "The
music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all
tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a
vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades,
or Bellini's suave melodies."
Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the
masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old
works, and always unspeakably precious as studies, (for Americans more
than any other people,) is it too much to say that by the shifted
combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of
first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period term'd
classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern'd by
recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the
most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible,
the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the
Aeneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy.
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