just like everything he had been brought up to admire. For by some strange and malignant fate the Italians, once arrived at baroque, seem to have got stuck there. They are still up to the eyes in it. Consider their literature, their modern painting and architecture, their music—it’s all baroque. It gesticulates rhetorically, it struts across stages, it sobs and bawls in its efforts to show you how passionate it is. In the midst, like a huge great Jesuit church, stands d’Annunzio.” “I should have thought,” said Miss Thriplow with barbed ingenuousness, “that you’d have liked that sort of elaboration and virtuosity. It’s ‘amusing’—isn’t that the word?” “True,” answered Mr. Cardan, “I like being amused. But I demand from my art the added luxury of being moved. And, somehow, one can’t feel emotion about anything so furiously and consciously emotional as these baroque things. It’s not by making wild and passionate gestures that an artist can awake emotion in the spectator. It isn’t done that way. These seventeenth-century Italians tried to express passion by making use of passionate gestures. They only succeeded in producing something that either leaves us cold—though it may, as you say, amuse us—or which actually makes us laugh. Art which is to move its contemplator must itself be still; it is almost an aesthetic law. Passion must never be allowed to dissipate itself in wild splashings and boilings over. It must be shut up, so to speak, and compressed and moulded by the intellect. Concentrated within a calm, untroubled form, its strength will irresistibly move. Styles that protest too much are not fit for serious, tragic use. They are by nature suited to comedy, whose essence is exaggeration. That is why good romantic art is so rare. Romanticism, of which the seventeenth-century baroque style is a queer sub-species, makes violent gestures; it relies on violent contrasts of light and shade, on stage effects; it is ambitious to present you with emotion in the raw and palpitating form. That is to say, the romantic style is in essence a comic style. And, except in the hands of a few colossal geniuses, romantic art is, in point of historical fact, almost always comic. Think of all the hair-raising romances written during the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries; now that the novelty has worn off them, we perceive them for what they are—the broadest comedies. Even writers of a great and genuine talent were betrayed by the essentially comic nature of a style into being farcical when they meant to be romantically tragical. Balzac, for example, in a hundred serious passages; George Sand in all her earlier novels; Beddoes, when he tries to make his _Death’s Jest Book_ particularly blood-curdling; Byron in _Cain_; de Musset in _Rolla_. And what prevents Herman Melville’s _Moby Dick_ from being a really great book is precisely the pseudo-Shakespearean idiom in which what are meant to be the most tragical passages are couched—an idiom