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This high opinion of me was strengthened by a declamatory habit, which made me an oracle and orator at the domestic board. The time was now at hand, however, that was to put my philosophy to the test. We had passed through a long winter, and the spring at length opened upon us with unusual sweetness.
But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed over imagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grew declamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official," the last refuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous in honor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted long after the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and Cowley had become neglected.
Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate simplicity of his verse, had obtained for Poetry a brief respite from a school at once declamatory and powerless, and led her forth for a "Sunshine Holiday" into the village green and under the hawthorn shade.
She was ashamed to speak of her girlish aspirations, such as they had been; and she could not tell the other motive the secret about Mr. Gwynne. Besides, Vanbrugh would have scorned the bare idea of her entering on the great career of Art for money! So she was silent. He did not seem to mind it at all, but went on talking, as he sometimes did, in a sort of declamatory monologue.
He possesses considerable power of mimicry, and rarely tells a story without imitating several different accents. His familiar tone, his declamatory tone, and his pathetic tone are quite different things. Sometimes Scotch predominates in his pronunciation; sometimes it is imperceptible.
A minute more, however, and the door burst open, and in they came, half a dozen glowing, breezy, vigorous young cavalrymen, ruddy with health, elastic with open-air life and exercise, brimful of good spirits and cordiality, and headed by the declamatory Blake, who made a bee-line for the bar, shouting, "'An if a man did need a poison now, Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him.
In his eyes, this declamatory poet was a republican more by virtue of his head than his heart or his intention, one of those men more capricious than morose, who cannot reconcile themselves to what exists, and prefer to fall back upon bygone generations, not knowing how to live like friendly folk among their contemporaries.
Further, it will be noted that the committee-work to which he was thus assigned was often of the homeliest and most prosaic kind, calling not for declamatory gifts, but for common sense, discrimination, experience, and knowledge of men and things.
"Well, Madame," resumed Scudery, "I now declare it in your house: this work, printed under my name, is by my sister she who translated 'Sappho' so agreeably." And without being asked, he recited in a declamatory tone verses ending thus: L'Amour est un mal agreable Don't mon coeur ne saurait guerir; Mais quand il serait guerissable, Il est bien plus doux d'en mourir.
Then, in a declamatory tone, he continued: "I, too, was permitted on the deck of the glittering vessel, lightly rocked by the crimson waves, to reach my welcome goal; as the guest of peerless Archias, I mean. The most magnificent festival in his villa! There was a little performance there in which Mentor and I allowed ourselves to be persuaded to take part.
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