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Show CONCLUSION. 517 vivid characters. The progress of the comic opera, and of the Ballet of the same species, must be more rapid than that of a spoken comedy. Music and pantomime cease to please when they are wanting in quick dramatic action. The composers of Naples excel in comic music: Cimarosa is a perfect model. Characters should be as clearly depicted and distinguished as one species of composition is from another. Some performers frequently speak and act the parts of kings, private individuals, and rustics, whose manners are so widely different from each other, in the same style and tone. But they should pay the closest attention to that interesting variety which, in nature, always distinguishes one rank from another. It may be difficult exactly to copy these peculiarities, but they are truth itself, and it is the first duty of actors to represent nature with fidelity; this, among the ancients, constituted their principal merit. The poet and the musician speak to the soul through the ear ; the dancer and mime, like the sculptor and painter, do the same, through the eye, by charming it with grace and perfection of attitude, expression, and the other beauties of which the arts they profess are susceptible. There is a close relation subsisting between all the fine arts ; there is a similarity of character between the Iliad and the Hercules Farnese; between the works of Virgil and Raphael; David and Canova ; Corneille and Michael Angelo ; Carracci, Guido and Tasso; Delille and Domini-chino; between those of Tintoretto and Lopez de Vega; Handel and Klopstock; Valentin and Ce"rbillon; Walter Scott and Paul Veronese; Guercino and Moore; Byron and Salvator Rosa; between some of the compositions of Mozart and the Dying Gladiator. Haydn may be termed the Phidias of music, and Boccherini its Correggio. 33 |