Now it is part of the ideality of the
highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of
profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a
smile, perhaps--some brief and wholly concrete moment--into which,
however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long
history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and
future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants
the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that
feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens of
Venice--exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be
spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some
consummate extract or quintessence of life.
It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like
this is really aspiring and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect
moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its
accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects.
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