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No one but Conrad would dare the mingling of such two dissociated genres as the romantic and the analytic, and if, here and there, the bleak rites of the one, and the lush sentiment of the other, fail to modulate, it is because the artistic undertaking is a well-nigh impossible one. Briefly, Victory relates the adventures of a gentleman and scholar in the Antipodes.
The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter their literary sensuality; but it is their taste which is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened; their principle of conduct escapes untouched. Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct genres.
Rome raises a doubtful claim to satire, but the substance of satire is present in the Old Comedy, and the form seems to have existed in writings now lost. There are even one or two genres, such as the imaginary speech, which Greece invented and which are not, fortunately, found in modern literature.
There is no standard now, no conventional type, no good "model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of tous les genres sont bons, surtout le genre ennuyeux. In almost any age of English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse. There is in them an unmistakeable Zeit-Geist in phraseology and form.
To Goethe he now said that in art, as in politics, there should be rule and ordered beauty; apropos of the drama imitated from Shakspere, which mingles tragedy and comedy, the terrible with the burlesque, he expressed surprise that a great mind like Goethe's did not like clean-cut models "N'aime pas les genres tranchés."
La folie des Croisades, comme tous les genres d'ivresse, n'avoit eu en France qu'une certaine durée, ou, pour parler plus exactement, de même que certaines fièvres, elle s'étoit calmée après quelques accès. Et assurément la croisade de Louis-le-Jeune, les deux de saint Louis plus désastreuses encore, avoient attiré sur le royaume assez de honte et de malheurs pour y croire ce fanatisme éteient
"Les grandes découvertes, les méditations de la pensée dans les arts, dans les sciences et dans les lettres, en un mot les travaux désintéresses de l'esprit dans tous les genres, les centres d'enseignement propres
The whole scene was deliciously mild. The moon came up; we passed back through the gallery and strolled about a little longer in the gardens. It was very still. I met my old gondolier in the twilight. He showed me his gondola, but I hated, somehow, to see it there. I don't like, as the French say, to mêler les genres. A gondola in a little flat French river?
Other nations have understood the art of writing, and left those monuments in words which are as unsubstantial and fleeting as air, yet more imperishable than brass or stone; but no nation has created literary art in the sense in which the Greeks created it, or developed, as they did, the various literary genres out of nothing. They had no models or guides or external help.
The first, as we have seen, under the guidance of such men as Bizet, Delibes, and Massenet, has approached so near to the confines of grand opera, that it is often difficult to draw the line between the two genres The second, under the influence of Offenbach, Hervé, and Lecocq, has shrunk into opéra bouffe, a peculiarly Parisian product, which, though now for some reason under a cloud, has added sensibly to the gaiety of nations during the past thirty years.
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