Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 30, 2025
The essential problem then of the classicists was to ask what would happen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control over machinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of "enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract and the right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the most cheering description.
No style that did not closely follow these rules was considered good. Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the classical author most copied by this school. His Epistles and Satires were considered models. The motto of the classicists was polished regularity. Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said:
In fact, it is not surprising that to the rigid classicists of the eighteenth century this Colossus had feet of clay. But, after all, even clay has a merit of its own: it is the substance of the common earth. That substance, entering into the composition of Molière, gave him his broad-based solidity, and brought him into kinship with the wide humanity of the world.
It is surely intellectual, classic, even factitious in conception as well as in execution. In some of its accessories it is even modish. It illustrates not merely the abstract turn of conceiving a subject which Rude always shared with the great classicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of treatment against which he always protested.
Seward said that insane people were simply those who were mentally ill, and that "Hospital" was the proper term. But the classicists retorted, "Nay, nay, William Henry, you have had your way in many things and here we will now have ours." It has taken us full a century officially to make the change, and the plain folks from the hills still refuse to ratify it, and will for many a lustrum.
In spite of appearances, Wagner is a classicist compared with Berlioz; he carried on and perfected the work of the German classicists; he made no innovations; he is the pinnacle and the close of one evolution of art. Berlioz began a new art; and one finds in it all the daring and gracious ardour of youth.
Nevertheless his claim for the imagination is fortunate in ruling out those theories of art which set up slavish fidelity to fact, under the name of imitation, as the essence of poetry. Bacon was not concerned with formulating a complete theory of poetry, but his pithy obiter dicta were influential in further establishing the sounder criticism of the Italian classicists.
Masses and oratorios are beyond the capacity of all but the most cultivated singers; and we suppose that the very prevalence of these collections which aim to please an average order of taste may, after all, furnish to large numbers a pleasure which the rigid classicists would deny them, without in any way filling the void.
Madame de Maintenon had thrust her leading nose between the doors of the factory and had scented outraged modesty in the reproduction there of the tapestries woven from models of Raphael, Giulio Romano and the classicists, cartoons in great favour after the hampering of Lebrun's imagination. The naked gods from Olympus must be clothed, said this pious and modest lady.
What to the sensitive critic is a charming wavering and swaying in the measure "Chopin leans about freely within his bars," wrote an English critic for the classicists was a rank departure from the time beat. According to Liszt's description of the rubato "a wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same that is the Chopin rubato."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking