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Hofmannsthal's "comedy for music," though gross and vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a sort of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled from eighteenth-century prints and memoirs.
I will let you have it on one condition that you give me your solemn promise never to venture into this country again." "Yes," he agreed, without enthusiasm nor surprise. She smiled happily at his gloomy face and listless attitude. "But I do not want to give up the little rifle entirely," she went on, with dainty preciosity, watching him closely.
M. Moreau-Vauthier is not perhaps a modern Cellini; he has certainly never produced anything that could be classed with the "Perseus" of the Loggia de' Lanzi, or even with the Fontainebleau "Diana;" but he does more than anyone else to keep alive the tradition of Florentine preciosity, and about everything he does there is something delightful.
I tried to sketch, too, the drive, wherein a dozen times in an hour these men face death with a smile or a curse the raging untamed river, the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they herd their brutish multitudes.
The Aeneid has none of the meretricious involutions of plot, none of the puzzling half-uttered allusions to essential facts, none of the teasing interruptions of the neoteric story book. The poet also learned to avoid the danger of stressing trivial and impertinent pathos, and he rejected the elegancies of style that threatened to lead to preciosity. What he kept, however, was of permanent value.
All other imitation is but to ape them, and would be recognized directly through exaggeration. Just as exaggeration of the sublime leads to inflation, and affectation of nobleness to preciosity, in the same manner affectation of grace ends in coquetry, and that of dignity to stiff solemnity, false gravity. There where true grace simply used ease and provenance, affected grace becomes effeminacy.
There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are usually more critical than creative, but their influence upon creators, and especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim in preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from the world.
Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good number of more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their medium, and infinitely curious concerning it. It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity.
And the Pope, hearing of this, had to send him a valuable Gift, which you may see some day. Nussler did, one day, see this preciosity: a Crucifix, ebony bordered with gold, and the Body all of that metal, on the smallest of altars, in Walrave's bedroom.
How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and "preciosity," of which the new book was not destitute.
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