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In "Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone.
Charlevoix, in describing the funeral of the North American Indians, says: Le cadavre est expose a la porte de la cabanne dans la posture qu'il doit avoir dans le tombeau, et cette posture en plusieurs endroits est cela de l'enfant dans la sein de sa mere.
An officer, a gentleman of talent, whose name was Hautmont, wrote the following verses upon Cardinal Mazarin, for which he was locked up in the Bastille for eighteen months: Creusons tous le tombeau A qui nous persecute; A ce Jules nouveauu Cherchons un nouveau Brute. Que le jour serait beau, Si nous voyions sa chute!
Géricault died early and left but a meagre product. Delacroix is par excellence the representative of the romantic epoch. And both by the mass and the quality of his work he forms a true connecting link between the classic epoch and the modern in somewhat the same way as Prudhon does, though more explicitly and on the other side of the line of division. He represents culture he knows art as well as he loves nature. He has a feeling for what is beautiful as well as a knowledge of what is true. He is pre-eminently and primarily a colorist he is, in fact, the introducer of color as a distinct element in French painting after the pale and bleak reaction from the Louis Quinze decorativeness. His color, too, is not merely the prismatic coloration of what had theretofore been mere chiaro-oscuro; it is original and personal to such a degree that it has never been successfully imitated since his day. Withal, it is apparently simplicity itself. Its hues are apparently the primary ones, in the main. It depends upon no subtleties and refinements of tints for its effectiveness. It is significant that the absorbed and affected Rossetti did not like it; it is too frank and clear and open, and shows too little evidence of the morbid brooding and hysterical forcing of an arbitrary and esoteric note dear to the English pre-Raphaelites. It attests a delight in color, not a fondness for certain colors, hues, tints a difference perfectly appreciable to either an unsophisticated or an educated sense. It has a solidity and strength of range and vibration combined with a subtle sensitiveness, and, as a result of the fusion of the two, a certain splendor that recalls Saracenic decoration. And with this mastery of color is united a combined firmness and expressiveness of design that makes Delacroix unique by emphasizing his truly classic subordination of informing enthusiasm to a severe and clearly perceived ideal an ideal in a sense exterior to his purely personal expression. In a word, his chief characteristic and it is a supremely significant trait in the representative painter of romanticism is a poetic imagination tempered and trained by culture and refinement. When his audacities and enthusiasms are thought of, the directions in his will for his tomb should be remembered too: "Il n'y sera placé ni emblème, ni buste, ni statue; mon tombeau sera copié très exactement sur l'antique, ou Vignoles ou Palladio, avec des saillies très prononcées, contrairement
Peut-être, avant que l'heure en cercle promenée Ait posé, sur l'émail brillant, Dans les soixante pas où sa route est bornée, Son pied sonore et vigilant, Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière At this unfinished stanza was the pensive poet summoned to the guillotine! The domestic life of genius. Defects of great compositions attributed to domestic infelicities.
On my former hurried visit to Moulins, as was the case with my predecessor, Arthur Young over a hundred years before, "other occupations" had "driven even Maria and the poplar from my head, and left me no room for the Tombeau de Montmorenci." In other words, I had visited Rome without seeing the Pope. On this second, and more leisurely visit, I had ample opportunity of making up for the omission.
Of said proclamation I hear only the thundering "Voila" at the commencement. Next he proceeds to open the doors of certain stone vaulted chambers, where the great men are buried, between whose claims and their Creator's there seems to be such an uncertainty in France. Well, here they were, sure enough, maintaining their claim by right of possession. "Voila le tombeau de Rousseau!" says the guide.
Thus the sonata concludes, as it began, enigmatically, like a sphinx with a mocking smile. H. Barbedette remarks in his "Chopin," a criticism without insight and originality, of this finale, "C'est Lazare grattant de ses ongles la pierre de son tombeau et tombant epuise de fatigue, de faim et de desespoir."
Tout ce que l'amitie par ces vers propose, C'est que tant qu'ici-bas le celeste flambeau; Eclairera tes jours tandis que je repose, Et lorsque le printemps paraissant de nouveau. De son sein abondant t'offre les fleurs ecloses, Chaque fois d'un bouquet de myrthes et de roses, Tu daignes parer mon tombeau."
An officer, a gentleman of talent, whose name was Hautmont, wrote the following verses upon Cardinal Mazarin, for which he was locked up in the Bastille for eighteen months: Creusons tous le tombeau A qui nous persecute; A ce Jules nouveauu Cherchons un nouveau Brute. Que le jour serait beau, Si nous voyions sa chute!
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