Sir Walter's fingers would have broken a spinet. His was no elaborately patterned music threaded with the light delicacies of melody. He struck big chords and used the loud pedal. His was the art of a Wagner rather than that of a Scarlatti. 'The Big Bow-wow strain,' he wrote, comparing himself with Jane Austen, 'I can do like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.' 'One man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing.' Scott knew that jewellery-work was not for him, and never tried his eyes by peering through the watchmaker's glass. He saw life, as a short-sighted man sees a landscape, in its essentials. He could spread over it what dress of detail he preferred, and chose that which came readiest to his hand, flinging over humanity the cloak of his boyish dreams. Humanity was not hampered by it, but moves through his pages like a stout wind over a northern moor.
THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830
THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830
The mingling of the arts.
Dumas in La Femme au Collier de Velours thus describes Hoffmann's room: 'It was the room of a genius at once capricious and picturesque, for it had the air of a studio, a music-shop, and a study, all together. There was a palette, brushes, and an easel, and on the easel the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a violin, and a piano, and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink, and paper, and on the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the walls were bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-century drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass necklaces, feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world of things, but a whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'
That account, whether from hearsay, conjecture, or knowledge, I do not know, is not only an admirable portrait of the room and brain of an arch-romantic, but might serve as a parable of the Romanticism of 1830. In that year Hugo's Hernani was produced at the Comédie Française, and the young men who battled with the Philistines for its success were drawn from the studios as well as from the libraries, and had their David in Théophile Gautier. Never before had the arts been so inextricably entangled, had antiquarianism been so lively and humane, had gems and worthless baubles been so confounded together. Chateaubriand had reaffirmed the pictorial rights of literature. Delacroix was painting pictures from Byron and from Dante, in bold, predominant colours, very different from the lassitudinous livery of the schools. There was a new generosity of sentiment responsible for Corot's landscapes and Barye's beasts. The sudden widening of knowledge and sympathy was expressed in the new broadness and courage of technique, and the same forces that covered the palette with vivid reds and blues, and compelled the sculptor to a virile handling of his chisel, found outlet in words also. Writers, like painters, seized the human, coloured, passionate elements in foreign literatures, looking everywhere for the liberty and brilliance they desired. The open-throated, sinewy, gladiatorial muse of Byron found here devoted worshippers, and the spacious movements of Shakespeare, his people alive and free, independent of the dramas in which for a few hours in the Globe Theatre they had had a part to play, delighted men with an outlook very different from, and hostile to, that of Voltaire, although he had done his share in making their outlook possible.