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This was done almost automatically, since I found myself unable to give a whole-hearted attention to the job, while the infernal motif of the engine's rag-time drone dominated everything and invited speculation on how much lower we were than the others, and whether we were likely to reach a friendly landing-ground.
She knew the latest operas, and loved the spirit of unrest, the unsettled minor chords of the new school of music; preferred the leit motif to the aria, music drama to opera, and was altogether exceedingly modern in her tastes. She did not like recitative in music, and preferred Wagner and Tschaikowsky to Bach and Verdi. She loved to be stirred up, she said.
It must be admitted that an original Arthurian romance of the twelfth or thirteenth century, when at latest such a poem would be written, in a language other than French, is so far unknown to us; and although as a matter of fact the central motif of the poem, the representation of a Moor as near akin to the Grail Winner, Sir Perceval, has not been preserved in any known French text, while it does exist in a famous German version, I for one find no difficulty in believing that the tradition existed in French, and that the original version of our poem was a metrical romance in that tongue.
There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers. The sexual motif figures hardly at all in American political imagery. Except in certain minor ecstasies of war, in an occasional scandal, or in phases of the racial conflict with Negroes or Asiatics, to speak of it at all would seem far-fetched.
When the great player improvised for Rossini, the latter says: "It is music that flows from the fountain-head. There is reservoir water and spring water. The former only runs when you turn the cock, and is always redolent of the vase; the latter always gushes forth fresh and limpid. Nowadays people confound the simple and the trivial; a motif of Mozart they would call trivial, if they dared."
The causes of these differences in the development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early motif, while classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at present to ascertain. But it is plain enough that later art has done little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to untutored races.
The spirit of the Eastern Hemisphere is conceived as feline and characterized as a human tiger cat. The spirit of the Western Hemisphere is conceived as taurine and characterized as a human bull. The base of the Equestrian is surrounded by a frieze of architecturalized fish and the rearing sea horses that furnish the principal upper motif for the play of water.
The characters are neither demons, like Cousin Betty, nor reckless debauchees, like Gertrude in The Stepmother. The whole motif is comic.
The motif is the same that of obligation and service and loyalty to a pledge. In "The Deserter" Mr. Davis does not reveal the young soldier's name, for obvious reasons, and the name of the hotel and ship in Salonika are likewise disguised.
Other motifs derived from Sterne, less integral, may be briefly summarized. From the Sentimental Journey is taken the motif that valuable or interesting papers be used to wrap ordinary articles of trade: here herring are wrapped in fragments of the father’s philosophy; in the Sentimental Journey we find a similar degrading use for the “Fragment.” Schummel breaks off the chapter “La Naïve,” under the Sternesque subterfuge of having to deliver manuscript to an insistent publisher. Yorick writes his preface to the Journey in the “Désobligeant,” that is, in the midst of the narrative itself. Schummel modifies the eccentricity merely by placing his foreword at the end of the volume. The value of it, he says, will repay the reader for waiting so long, a
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