It
is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage
scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes,
and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks
and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us
dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread
fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational,
the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly
impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all
substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains
of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these
loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost
insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these
pretentious facades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, these
Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of the
brass, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of
the cross and the Gregorian modes.
No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic
attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the
light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which
you grew.
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