United States or Montserrat ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Eschewing the stiff, affected classicalism of the Empire style, the furniture was the best work of André Boule and Riesener; tables, with fine marquetry of the last century, made of tulip wood and mahogany; mirrors from Tourlaville; couches with tapestry woven in fanciful designs after Fragonard, in the looms of Beauvais couches that were made for conversation, not repose; cabinets exemplifying agreeable disposition of lines and masses in the inlaid adornment, containing tiny drawers that fitted with old-time exactness, and, without jamming, opened and shut at the touch.
And in examining into the spirit of these three epochs, observe, I don't mean to compare their bad men, I don't mean to take Tiberius as a type of Classicalism, nor Ezzelin as a type of Mediævalism, nor Robespierre as a type of Modernism.
They forget that nobody would have had the slightest idea what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that the rules deduced from the plays that have already been written are no eternal law for the plays that will be. Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable enemies. Let it be understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which a living tradition offers.
How are we through politics to get at that confusion? We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of life. We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and literature, and its exploration through research.
It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest classical scholars in England Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern are political radicals. The man whom I call here the classicalist cannot possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be nothing new under the sun. The United States, you imagine, would of all nations be the freest from classicalism.
You have, then, the three periods: Classicalism, extending to the fall of the Roman empire; Mediævalism, extending from that fall to the close of the fifteenth century; and Modernism thenceforward to our days.
Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity.
Instead of from the worm to the butterfly, it is very possible it may have been from the butterfly to the worm. Have patience with me for a moment after I tell you what I believe it to have been, and give me a little time to justify my words. I say that Classicalism began, wherever civilization began, with Pagan Faith.
How came it to yield to Classicalism which was based on infidelity, and to oppose no barrier to innovations, which have reduced the once faithfully conceived imagery of its worship to stage decoration? Shall we not rather find that Romanism, instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of Protestantism from its side?
In Dutch furniture of this time one sees the reproduction of the Napoleonic fashion the continuation of the Revolutionists' classicalism.
Word Of The Day