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Certain Noble Plays of Japan - From the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa by Ezra Pound
page 7 of 60 (11%)
heightened the emotional effect of Elizabethan Tragedy, Cleopatra's old
man with an asp let us say, carrying the tragic crisis by its contrast
above the tide-mark of Corneille's courtly theatre, was made at the
outset to please the common citizen standing on the rushes of the floor;
but the great speeches were written by poets who remembered their patrons
in the covered galleries. The fanatic Savonarola was but dead a century,
and his lamentation in the frenzy of his rhetoric, that every prince of
the Church or State throughout Europe was wholly occupied with the fine
arts, had still its moiety of truth. A poetical passage cannot be
understood without a rich memory, and like the older school of painting
appeals to a tradition, and that not merely when it speaks of 'Lethe's
Wharf' or 'Dido on the wild sea-banks' but in rhythm, in vocabulary; for
the ear must notice slight variations upon old cadences and customary
words, all that high breeding of poetical style where there is nothing
ostentatious, nothing crude, no breath of parvenu or journalist.

Let us press the popular arts on to a more complete realism, for that
would be their honesty; and the commercial arts demoralise by their
compromise, their incompleteness, their idealism without sincerity
or elegance, their pretence that ignorance can understand beauty. In the
studio and in the drawing-room we can found a true theatre of beauty.
Poets from the time of Keats and Blake have derived their descent only
through what is least declamatory, least popular in the art of
Shakespeare, and in such a theatre they will find their habitual
audience and keep their freedom. Europe is very old and has seen many
arts run through the circle and has learned the fruit of every flower and
known what this fruit sends up, and it is now time to copy the East and
live deliberately.


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