The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
And their works,--for by these shall ye know them,--do they reflect in
nothing this fitful, uneasy, yet splendid intensity of to-day? Can you not
read in the colors on Turner's canvas, can you not see in the rush of
Church's Niagara, can you not hear in the strains of the Traviata, can you
not perceive in the tones and looks of Ristori, just what you find in the
successful men in other spheres of life? Rothschild's fortune speaks no
more plainly than the Robert le Diable; George Sand's novels and Carlyle's
histories tell the same story as Kossuth's eloquence and Garibaldi's
deeds. The artists are as alive to-day as any in the the world. For, again
and again, art is not an outside thing; its professors, its lovers, are not
placed outside the world; they are in it and of it as absolutely as the
rest. You who think otherwise, remember that Verdi's name six months ago
was the watchword of the Italian revolutionists; remember that certain
operas are forbidden now to be played in Naples, lest they should arouse
the countrymen of Masaniello; remember, or learn, if you did not know, how
in New York, last June, all the singers in town offered their services for
a benefit to the Italian cause, and all the _habitués_, late though the
season was, crowded to their places to see an opera whose attractiveness
had been worn out and whose novelty was nearly gone. You who think that art
is an interest unworthy of men who live in the world, that it is a thing
apart, what say you to the French, the most actual, the most practical, the
most worldly of peoples, and yet the fondest of art in all its phases,--the
French, who remembered the statues in the Tuileries amid the massacres of
the First Revolution, and spared the architecture of antiquity when they
bombarded the city of the Caesars?
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