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The defective imitation here of Shakspeare is not to be mistaken: Francis Moor is a prosaical Richard III., ennobled by none of the properties which in the latter mingle admiration with aversion. Cabale und Liebe can hardly affect us by its extravagant sentimentality, but it tortures us by the most painful impressions. Fiesco is in design the most perverted, in effect the feeblest.
This passage illustrates also the difference between the highly- developed imagination of the one and the stodgy prosaical temperament of the other. Tom could enter into the elementary question of giving his schoolfellow a black eye, but could not possibly enter into the drama of the imaginary arrival of a lion. He was sorely in need of fairy stories.
He meets with and converts the giant Morgante, whose aid he receives in many adventures, among which is the taking of Babylon. They die, however, victorious; and the two royal and noble scoundrels, by a piece of prosaical justice better than poetical, are despatched like common malefactors, with a halter.
The extraordinary events which are produced by intrigue are consequently banished from it: to cover this want of motion, the writer has recourse to a characterization wholly individual, and capable of receiving vividness from a practised player, but attaches itself to external peculiarities just as a bad portrait-painter endeavours to attain a resemblance by noticing every pit of small-pox and wart, and peculiar dress and cravat-tie: the motives and situations are sometimes humorous and droll, but never truly diverting, as the serious and prosaical aim which is always kept in view completely prevents this.
In the very progress of the piece, the dreamy carelessness of such an existence is sensibly expressed: it is even alluded to by Shakspeare in the title. Whoever affects to be displeased, if in this romantic forest the ceremonial of dramatic art is not duly observed, ought in justice to be delivered over to the wise fool, to be led gently out of it to some prosaical region.
I think it was then and there that my hopes for the elevation of juvenile Wallencamp received their deathblow, and my labors, which had before been cheered by a dream of partially satisfying success, at least, took on an utterly goal-less and prosaical form. These children, I was forced to admit, regarded the day of Mr.
I found that they could not read, but they could write in a truly fluent and unconventional style; they could not commit prosaical facts to memory, but they could sing songs containing any number of irrelevant stanzas. They could not "cipher," but they had witty and salient answers ready for any emergency.
He will sacrifice every thing like the gladsome inspiration of fun and all truly poetical amusement, for the dull and formal seriousness of prosaic life, and for prosaical applications stamped with the respectable name of morals. That Marivaux is a mannerist is so universally acknowledged in France, that the peculiar term of marivaudage has been invented for his mannerism.
It is not dramatic truth, but absolute imitation of life, and instead of the mitigated emotion which a poetical representation of tragic events excites, it produces a sense of positive suffering too acutely painful for an artistic result; it is a perfectly prosaical reproduction of the familiar vice and its inseparable misery of modern everyday life; it wants elevation and imagination aërial perspective; it is close upon one, and must be agonizing to see well acted.
Here Gozzi had fallen almost accidentally on a fund of whose value he was not, perhaps, fully aware: his prosaical, and for the most part improvisatory, masks, forming altogether of themselves the irony on the poetical part.
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