Perhaps in this century we are too altruistic to be really artistic.
I am led to hope that the University will some day have a theatre of its own, and that proficiency
in scene-painting will be regarded as a necessary qualification for the Slade Professorship. On the stage, literature returns to life and archæology becomes art. A fine theatre is a temple where all the muses may meet, a second Parnassus.
It would be sad indeed if the many volumes of poems that are every year published in London found no readers but the authors themselves and the authors’ relations; and the real philanthropist should recognize it as part of his duties to buy every new book of verse that appears.
A fifteen-line sonnet is as bad a monstrosity as a sonnet in dialogue.
Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading. They give us facts without form, science without style, and learning without life.
The Roman patron, in fact, kept the Roman poet alive, and we fancy that many of our modern bards rather regret the old system. Better, surely, the humiliation of the sportula than the indignity of a bill for printing! Better to accept a country-house as a gift than to be in debt to one’s landlady! On the whole, the patron was an excellent institution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; . . . every poet longs for a Mæcenas.
The two things the Greeks valued most in actors were grace of gesture and music of voice. Indeed, to gain these virtues their actors used to subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics and a particular regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a quality of art, but a condition of its production.
One should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their culture.