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Updated: May 19, 2025
the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly.
I heard Tilton give this lecture twice, and it was given from start to finish in exactly the same way. It contained much learning had flights of eloquence, bursts of bathos, puffs of pathos, but not a smile in the whole hour and a half. It was faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection no more. It was so perfect that some people thought it great.
Not until a new order of things is established, and we have done with tribulation, tears, and death, shall we again know such sensations; nor is it indeed quite certain that human heart and brain could twice sustain them here below! Reaction came at last! Life is full of bathos as well as pathos.
There Richard's himself again! This stroke of bathos brought about good-humor again, and soon our whole attention was absorbed in that magical music which to this hour electrifies me more than that of any other opera excepting "Norma." "Bad taste this," connoisseurs will say; but the perfection of human enjoyment is to pursue one's own tastes independently of Mrs.
This strain of thought is expressed even more clearly in that extraordinary bit of bathos, which with solemn irony the great dramatist who wrote this book makes this Eliphaz utter immediately after the text, 'The Almighty shall be thy defence and thou shalt have plenty of silver! It has not been left for commercial Englishmen to recommend religion on the ground that it produces successful merchants and makes the best of both worlds.
But have you ever seen a straw, caught on a snag, try to stop a river? To your sentimentalist that straw looks heroic; to anybody that knows the difference between bathos and pathos it simply looks silly. The river of life is bigger than that of any nation. We can't stop it, but we can swell it by going with it. Did you ever see a mule drink against the current?"
But we, in our "superior" condition, pooh-pooh the Byronic spirit of indifference to events and scorn of trifles, we say it is "melodramatic," completely forgetting that our attitude towards ourselves and things in general is one of most pitiable bathos.
Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious fancy aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative sympathy in the spectator such men will not take the point of view required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the 'Worship of the Golden Calf' and in the 'Destruction of the World by Water. It is for them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai in lightnings.
The humor is honest and golden; it never wearies the reader; the pathos is never sentimentalized, never degenerates into bathos, is never morbid.
They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper's description of the Empress of Russia's palace of ice, 'as worthless as in show 'twas glittering'
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