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The poetry of Queen Anne's time and thereabouts, I judge to have been at the lowest bathos of badness; all satyrs, and swains, fulsome flattery of titles, and foolish adoration of painted shepherdesses: poor weak hobbling lines, eked out by 'eds and expletives, often terminated by false rhymes, and made lamer by triplets and dreary Alexandrines; ill-selected subjects, laboured, indelicate, or impossible similes, passions frigid as Diana, wit's weapons dull as lead.
Governments suc- ceed each other and bid for success by different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should say here, in every platform. The works of art are often ill-selected, there is an official taste which you immediately recognize, but the custom is essen- tially liberal, and a government which should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common.
A system which, if staffed with saints, would have been barely tolerable, became iniquitous when it was committed to the charge of petty officials, ill-paid, ill- supervised, and ill-selected. To a great extent the crimes and follies of the medieval Church were those of a complex bureaucracy in a half-civilised state.
But English experience, and a longer experience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidate nominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that a parliament of well-selected members who represent somewhat roughly the opinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selected members who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quote Lord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, a reflection of the community.
We can never hope to revive Greek architecture, nor should we attempt to do so. There was once a well-known Scotch architect who held that the column and the lintel was the only permissible form of construction, and with this limitation and ill-selected Greek details he produced some fantastically ugly buildings. Following a similar line of thought a famous critic of the last century condemned methods of construction not sanctioned by the Old Testament. Both were wide of the mark; because, above and beyond all technical details of architecture is the spirit in which it is approached, the intellectual outlook of the artist on his art, and this may express itself in widely differing forms. In Greek architecture of the Golden period, that outlook was definite and distinctive, and it was one that has a very urgent lesson for us to-day. The aim and ideal of the Greek was beauty of form, and this beauty, which he sought in the first instance as the expression of his religion, ultimately became almost a religion in itself. To the realization of this ideal he devoted all his powers, sparing himself no pains in chastening his work till it had attained the utmost perfection possible. He merged himself in this work, without thought of the expression of himself in his vision of a divine and immutable beauty. It hardly occurred to him that his individual emotions were worth preserving. (In the sculpture of the great period the expression of the face is usually one of unruffled calm.) Although religious emotion was the source and inspiration of his work, his work was impersonal. He was aloof from that feverish anxiety for self-revelation which has made much modern art so interesting pathologically, and so detestable otherwise. Nor again had he anything of the virtuoso about him. To him technique was not an end in itself. In Hellenistic art it became so, but not in the Golden Age. Indeed, he was sometimes almost careless of exact modelling, and in architecture he did not use the order as a mere exhibition of scholarship. In his search for beautiful form, he stood upon the ancient ways, patient and serene, moving steadily to his appointed end. 'Ainsi procède le génie grec, moins soucieux du nouveau que du mieux, il reporte vers l'épuration des formes l'activité que d'autres dépensent en innovations souvent stériles, jusqu'
It was, then, with every expectation of victory in 1832 that the sanguine Clay came back to Congress in December, 1831; even John Quincy Adams, who now became a member of the House, was not without hope that the ill-selected Cabinet of Jackson would go to pieces and that a "restoration" would follow in due time.
The children in their broken shoes and thin, ill-selected clothing, shivered on the roads between house and mill, and gave colour to the statement of many employers that they were better off in the thoroughly warmed factories than at home. But the factories were a little too thoroughly warmed.
A wicked practice was introduced of painting or dyeing certain woven parts in which the colours had been ill-selected. All these things resulted in constantly increasing restrictions by the guild of tapissiers and by order of royal patrons. But fraud is hard to suppress when the animus of the perpetrator is wrong.
Neither did she think that a sunny corner of the back porch near the chimney, though convenient, was an ill-selected spot for a refrigerator.
The poetry of Queen Anne's time and thereabouts, I judge to have been at the lowest bathos of badness; all satyrs, and swains, fulsome flattery of titles, and foolish adoration of painted shepherdesses: poor weak hobbling lines, eked out by 'eds and expletives, often terminated by false rhymes, and made lamer by triplets and dreary Alexandrines; ill-selected subjects, laboured, indelicate, or impossible similes, passions frigid as Diana, wit's weapons dull as lead.
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