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Save only those constructive errors or dissonances previously referred to, and which tend to counteract the soaring characteristic, it could be considered as being pure in style. Nevertheless, it is not only the truest Gothic cathedral on the peninsula, but one of the finest in the world. At the same time, it is no less true that it is not so Spanish as either the Gothic of Burgos or of Toledo.
And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "comprehensive" as those with the sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli, beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set forth the categories whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily, yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat surface of his picture. He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox. Suspected during his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic. Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the "new learning" doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the starry hosts were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Citt
This tone of mind we have described is inseparable from strong feeling; and although poetry cannot remove these internal dissonances, she must at least endeavour to effect an ideal reconciliation of them. As earnestness, in the highest degree, is the essence of tragic representation; so is sport of the comic.
His language is so barren of imagery, that his characters seem altogether devoid of fancy; it is broken and harsh: he wished to steel it anew, and in the process it not only lost its splendour, but became brittle and inflexible. Not only is he not musical, but positively anti- musical; he tortures our feelings by the harshest dissonances, without any softening or solution.
In presenting a brief glimpse of the two most powerful personalities that ever impressed themselves upon the world, I desire to place them side by side that we may appreciate the assonances and the dissonances of their wonderful lives and rise through the study into a true conception and love of the most perfect Life ever breathed upon earth.
The nations compressed in the severe unity of the Middle Ages escaped in the Reformation from the uniform mould that had long enveloped them, and tended to that other unity, still very distant, which must spring from the spontaneous view of the same truth by all men, result from the free and original development of each nation, and, as in a vast concert, unite harmonious dissonances.
But that perception could not always be evoked at will; and ordinarily Lilla was aware only of a faint echo from a distant region of pathos and delight an echo that reached her, through a host of other sounds, like the intrinsic spirit of an ultra-modern symphony, so wrapped up in dissonances as to be nearly unintelligible. "Where is he?" she wondered.
In the absence of vibratory media the noises of the reef are isolated. furtive, echoless staccato accidentals and dull dissonances out of tune with the soothing theme of the sea. Hence, when, as I wandered absorbed in an inspection of minor details, and a mellow whistle, constant but varying in volume, broke in upon my musings, it was vain to repress the thrill of excitement.
It was a strangely still wood for the tropics, no chattering parroquets, no screaming magpies, none of the sneering, gibing dissonances that I had been accustomed to, all was silent, and yet intensely living. I fancied that the noble trees took pleasure in growing, they were so energized with life in every leaf.
The scene then suddenly changes to the celebration of the Witches' Sabbath on the summits of the Brocken, where, amid wild witch choruses, mighty dissonances, and weird incantation music, Faust is shown a vision of the sorrow of Marguerite. The third act opens in a prison, where Marguerite is awaiting the penalty for murdering her babe.
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