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Updated: June 19, 2025
It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled him to work the miracle. His lack of self-respect and humour, his childish egotism, his love of gossip, his naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much to the making of his immortal book as his industry, his wonderful verbal memory, and his doglike fidelity. I have said that his greatness is only reflected. But that is hardly just.
But he should not make the Capitol a "Place of Wailing" and the Congressional Record a book of bathos.
He loved his joke, and his wine, and his dinner, just as much as if he had been of a fatter frame; and it was a fine specimen of the practical antithesis, to hear a good story, or a jovial expression, leap friskily out of that long, curved mouth; it was at once a paradox and a bathos it was the mouse coming out of its hole in Ely Cathedral.
Truly we have been most unfortunate, æsthetically speaking, in our military caps; and, to go no further back than Peninsular recollections, from the conico-cylindrical cap of Vimiera to the funny little thing with a flap up in front of Vittoria and Waterloo, down through the inverted cone-shaped shako of recent days until we have come to the very bathos of all chapellerie that now disgraces the heads of too many among our infantry regiments all has been bad.
The Licensed Victuallers or the Commercial Travellers propose to make a school for their children; and I suppose, in the matter of schools, one may call the Licensed Victuallers or the Commercial Travellers ordinary men, with their natural taste for the bathos still strong; and a Sovereign with the advice of men like Wilhelm von Humboldt or Schleiermacher may, in this matter, be a better judge, and nearer to right reason.
Looking back across the long succession of crowded years upon the period of my struggle to obtain a foothold in the London world of journalism and literature, I see a certain amount of pathos, some bathos, and something too in the way of steadfast, unmercenary endurance, which is not altogether unworthy of respect.
No master has excelled, or perhaps matched, Wagner in the art of expressing the most profound and poignant pathos without ever a suspicion of letting it lapse into bathos; and this he does by what at first it may seem ridiculous to say of so opulent and luxurious a genius as Wagner's by his instinctive artistic austerity.
It cannot, however, be concealed that, by his own confession, he was the aggressor, for nobody believes that the letters in the "Bathos" were placed at random; and at may be discovered that, when he thinks himself concealed, he indulges the common vanity of common men, and triumphs in those distinctions which he affected to despise.
Tragic as a rash act, such as Mark was contemplating, is when successful, an interruption brings with it an inevitable bathos; when he first felt that grasp on his arm, he thought himself in the power of a German policeman, and, prepared as he was a moment before to face a sudden death, he quailed before the prospect of some degrading and complicated official process; it was almost a relief to see instead his bitterest enemy!
Wagner well knew when the drama could make its effect almost unaided when, in fact, to write deliberately pathetic music in the older style would be to overdo things. Sieglinda's phrases are simple, many of them exquisite, most of them designed to be sung parlando, rather spoken than really sung. Bathos is avoided: the deepest depths of genuine pathos are touched.
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