Various

“ No other great composer has ever so overcrowded his life with occasional and mechanical work as Handel, and in no other artist are the qualities that make the difference between inspired and uninspired pages more difficult to analyse. The libretti of his oratorios are full of absurdities, except when they are derived in every detail from Scripture, as in the Messiah and Israel in Egypt, or from the classics of English literature, as in Samson and L’Allegro. ”

“ Nowadays we happen to regard the shape of a whole composition as its form, and its theme as its matter. And, as artistic organization becomes more complex and heterogeneous, the need of the broadest and most forcible possible outline of design is more pressingly felt; so that in what we choose to call form we are willing to sacrifice all conception of originality for the sake of general intelligibility, while we insist upon complete originality in those thematic details which we are pleased to call matter. ”

“ And when the whole series of plagiarisms is studied, the fact forces itself upon us that nothing except themes and forms which are common property in all 18th-century music, has yet been discovered as the source of any work of Handel’s which is not felt as part of a larger design. Operatic arias were never felt as parts of a whole. The opera was a concert on the stage, and it stood or fell, not by a dramatic propriety which it notoriously neglected to consider at all, but by the popularity of its arias. There is no aria in Handel’s operas which is traceable to another composer. ”

“ Yet probably to no one man, except perhaps to Washington, does American nationalism owe so much as to Hamilton.
In the development of the United States the influence of Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian democracy has been a reactive union; but changed conditions since Hamilton’s time, and particularly since the Civil War, are likely to create misconceptions as to Hamilton’s position in his own day. Great constructive statesman as he was, he was also, from the American point of view, essentially a reactionary. ”

“ When we add to this the characteristics of a method like Handel’s, in which musical technique has become a masterly automatism, it becomes evident that our conception of originality must be at least as broad as that which we would apply in the criticism of architecture. The disadvantages of the want of such a conception have been aggravated by the dearth of general knowledge of the structure of musical art; a knowledge which shows that the parallel we have suggested between music and architecture, as regards the nature of originality, is no mere figure of speech. ”

“ Illusion may be defined as the misinterpretation of sense-impression, while hallucination, in its typical instances, is the experiencing of a sensory presentation, i.e. a presentation having the sensory vividness that distinguishes perceptions from representative imagery, at a time when no stimulus is acting on the corresponding sense-organ. There is, however, good reason to think that in many cases, possibly in all cases, some stimulation of the sense-organ, coming either from without or from within the body, plays a part in the genesis of the hallucination. ”

“ The high level of excellence which is found in its selections, both as to form and matter, is remarkable, and caused it to be said that Abū Tammām displayed higher qualities as a poet in his choice of extracts from the ancients than in his own compositions. What strikes us chiefly in the class of poetry of which the Ḥamāsa is a specimen, is its exceeding truth and reality, its freedom from artificiality and hearsay, the evident first-hand experience which the singers possessed of all of which they sang. ”

“ From the moment when a woman, free or slave, enters into any kind of wifely relation with a man, she has a legally enforceable right against him both for her own and for her children’s maintenance. She has absolute control over her personal property whether in money, slaves or goods; and, if divorce is far easier in Islam than in Christendom, still the marriage settlement must be of such amount as will provide suitable maintenance in that event. ”

“ On the other hand, of course, the system is open to the gravest abuse, and in countries like Persia, Morocco and India, the life of Moslem women and slaves is often far different from that of middle class women of European Turkey, where law is strict and culture advanced. The early age at which girls are secluded, the dulness of their surroundings, and the low moral standard which the system produces react unfavourably not only upon their moral and intellectual growth but also upon their capacity for motherhood and their general physique. ”

“ The popular idea that Handel’s style is easily recognizable comes from the fact that he overshadows all his predecessors and contemporaries, except Bach, and so makes us regard typical 18th-century Italian and English style as Handelian, instead of regarding Handel’s style as typical Italian 18th-century. Nothing in music requires more minute expert knowledge than the sifting of the real peculiarities of Handel’s style from the mass of contemporary formulae which in his inspired pages he absorbed, and which in his uninspired pages absorbed him. ”

“ In every art there is an antithesis between form and matter, which becomes reconciled only when the work of art is perfect in its execution. And, whatever this perfection, the antithesis must always remain in the mind of the artist and critic to this extent, that some part of the material seems to be the special subject of technical rule rather than another. ”

“ After Washington’s death the Federalist leadership was divided (and disputed) between John Adams, who had the prestige of a varied and great career, and greater strength than any other Federalist with the people, and Hamilton, who controlled practically all the leaders of lesser rank, including much the greater part of the most distinguished men of the country, so that it has been very justly said that “the roll of his followers is enough of itself to establish his position in American history” (Lodge) . But Hamilton was not essentially a popular leader. ”

“ But Hamilton’s governmental system was in fact repressive.17 He wanted a system strong enough, he would have said, to overcome the anarchic tendencies loosed by war, and represented by those notions of natural rights which he had himself once championed; strong enough to overbear all local, state and sectional prejudices, powers or influence, and to control—not, as Jefferson would have it, to be controlled by—the people. ”

“ His last letter on politics, written two days before his death, illustrates the two sides of his thinking already emphasized: in this letter he warns his New England friends against dismemberment of the union as “a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy, the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent.” ”

“ Trade and Shipping.—Probably there is no place which during the last thirty years of the 19th century grew faster commercially than Hamburg. Its commerce is, however, almost entirely of the nature of transit trade, for it is not only the chief distributing centre for the middle of Europe of the products of all other parts of the world, but is also the chief outlet for German, Austrian, and even to some extent Russian (Polish) raw products and manufactures. ”

“ An inventive 16th-century composer is as clearly distinguishable from a dull one as a good architect from a bad. The originality of the composer resides, in 16th-century music as in all art, in his whole work; but naturally his conception of property and ideas will not extend to themes or isolated passages. That man is entitled to an idea who can show what it means, or who can make it mean what he likes. ”

“ Under the pressure of commercial and political necessity, authority was definitely transferred from the Hansas of merchants abroad to the Hansa of towns at home, and the sense of unity had become such that in 1380 a Lübeck official could declare that “whatever touches one town touches all.” But even at the time when union was most important, this statement went further than the facts would warrant, and in the course of the following century it became less and less true. ”

“ That they are felt as absurdities and defects already shows that Handel created in English oratorio a true art-form on the largest possible scale.
There never has been a time when Handel has been overrated, except in so far as other composers have been neglected. But no composer has suffered so much from pious misinterpretation and the popular admiration of misleading externals. It is not the place here to dilate upon the burial of Handel’s art beneath the “mammoth” performances of the Handel Festivals at the Crystal Palace ”

“ Hamilton always seems to be reasoning deductively from such principles. He went too far and fast for even such a Federalist disbeliever in democracy as Gouverneur Morris; who, to Hamilton’s assertion that democracy must be cast out to save the country, replied that “such necessity cannot be shown by a political ratiocination. Luckily, or, to speak with a reverence proper to the occasion, providentially, mankind are not disposed to embark the blessings they enjoy on a voyage of syllogistic adventure to obtain something more beautiful in exchange. ”

“ As to the transcendent military genius of Hannibal there cannot be two opinions. The man who for fifteen years could hold his ground in a hostile country against several powerful armies and a succession of able generals must have been a commander and a tactician of supreme capacity. In the use of stratagems and ambuscades he certainly surpassed all other generals of antiquity. Wonderful as his achievements were, we must marvel the more when we take into account the grudging support he received from Carthage. ”

“ The brown hare is a night-feeding animal, remaining during the day on its “form,” as the slight depression is called which it makes in the open field, usually among grass. This it leaves at nightfall to seek fields of young wheat and other cereals whose tender herbage forms its favourite food. It is also fond of gnawing the bark of young trees, and thus often does great damage to plantations. In the morning it returns to its form, where it finds protection in the close approach which the colour of its fur makes to that of its surroundings ”

“ No one has more successfully popularized the greatest artistic ideals than Handel; no artist is more disconcerting to critics who imagine that a great man’s mental development is easy to follow. Not even Wagner effected a greater Handel as composer. transformation in the possibilities of dramatic music than Handel effected in oratorio, yet we have seen that Handel was the very opposite of a reformer. ”

“ He sees all that is irresponsible for good and evil in a woman’s character, all that is untrustworthy in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her variability. He is her apologist, but always with a reserve of private judgment. No one has created more attractive women of a certain class, women whom a man would have been more likely to love or to regret loving. ”

“ Gradually native Christian churches are making provision for the attendance of women at their services, though the sexes are rigorously kept apart. In India, as in Turkey, the introduction of Western dress and education has begun to create new ideas and ambitions, and not a few Eastern women have induced English women to enter the harems as companions, nurses and governesses. But training and environment are extremely powerful, and in some parts of the Mahommedan world, the supply of Asiatic, European and even American girls is so steady, that reform has touched only the fringe of the system. ”