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Updated: May 8, 2025
Nevertheless, seven years later still, he once more returns to the attack, and declares that Wagner's music, "apart from the performance, is simply amateurish, void of contents, and disagreeable; and it is a sad proof of corrupt taste that, in the face of the many dramatic master-works which Germany has produced, some persons have the presumption to belittle these in favor of Wagner's.
Until then we must use the French, which is to-day the language of the world, and in which one can render all the master-works of the Greeks and the Latins, with the same versatility, delicacy, and subtlety, as the original.
It is, of course, not to be compared architecturally with the master-works of Agra and Delhi, and the internal decorations are usually tawdry and uninteresting. The entrance is fine; the visitor ascends the steep street to the principal gate, a massive portal, strengthened against the battering of elephants by huge spikes, and decorated by a pair of these animals in fresco-rampant.
Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man. He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-century America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition of character, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as the master-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actual life; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them.
And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the sonnets and madrigals, the "bouts-rimes," the practical jokes, the logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him outside the pale.
A tablet to his memory was placed near the grave, and the inscription on it is said to have been written by the wife of Sir Robert Howard, author of the Indian Queen and other forgotten master-works. The light of English music had gone out, though few at the moment realised it, for Dr. Blow and Eccles and others went on composing music which was thought very good.
The comeliness of average humanity was enough for them; the difficulties of reproducing what they saw, exhausted their force. Thus the master-works on which they staked their reputation show them emulous of fame as craftsmen, while only here and there, in minor paintings for the most part, the poet that was in them sees the light.
In this the Sartor Resartus resembles some of the master-works of human invention, which have been acknowledged as such by many generations; and especially the works of Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne and Swift. There is nothing I know of in Antiquity like it. That which comes nearest is perhaps the Platonic Dialogue.
The young author who aspires to write novels must not only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even more important that he should so order his life as to grow cunning in the basic truths of human nature. His first problem the problem of acquiring technic is comparatively easy. Technic may be learned from books the master-works of art in fiction. It may be studied empirically.
Indeed, at the Italian opera-house he found more that was to his taste than at the French opera-houses. Bellini's music had a particular charm for Chopin, and he was also an admirer of Rossini. The above notes exemplify and show the truth of Liszt's remark: In the great models and the master-works of art Chopin sought only what corresponded with his nature.
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