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Updated: May 8, 2025
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.
The extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and the cupola of the cathedral. Both of these are master-works of personal originality.
Wagner's pugnacity and frequent ill-temper, for instance, arose simply from the fact that, while he was toiling night and day to compose immortal master-works, his contemporaries not only refused to contribute enough for his daily bread, but assailed him on all sides with malicious lying, stupid criticisms, with as much obvious enjoyment of this flaying alive of a genius as if they were a band of Indians torturing a prisoner of war.
It is scarcely possible to imagine a condition of thought or feeling in which these master-works shall seem quaint or old-fashioned. They appeal, now and always, with that calm power of perfection, to the heart and eyes of every man born of woman.
M. Saint-Saëns, who is considered the best living score-reader, compares Wagner's scores to those master-works of mediæval architecture which are adorned with sculptured reliefs that must have required infinite care and labor in the chiselling.
This is like what the Royal Academicians say when they do not intend to hang our pictures; they can, however, generally find space for a picture if they want to hang it, and we assume with safety that there are no master-works by painters of the very highest rank for which no space has been available. Want of space will, indeed, prevent my quoting from more than one other paragraph of Mr.
The tall tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the bulk of the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass of Santa Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define the city of flowers from the gardens round about her. Even the master-works of his successors subordinate their beauty to his first conception.
The Northern traveller, standing beneath his master-works in Parma, may hear from each of those radiant and laughing faces what the young Italian said to Goethe: Perchè pensa? pensando s' invecchia. Michael Angelo is the prophet or seer of the Renaissance.
'Where is he? said Lord Eskdale. 'He is alone in the cook's room. 'I will go and say a word to him. Alone, in the cook's room, gazing in listless vacancy on the fire, that fire which, under his influence, had often achieved so many master-works, was the great artist who was not appreciated.
Mozart helped to make his own meaning clear to him, divined what he was groping after, and himself seized it and made glorious use of it, and Haydn profited, so that we have his master-works. But the experiments possess for us little more than the interest of experiments. Yet they were new and inspiring at the time.
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