e 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. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical
postures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achieve
sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatrical
postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men
among whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully
become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual
fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their _amour-propre_ that
they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by
exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and
seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms.
Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning

"Nature to her feud
With bile & buskin attitude,"

was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own
insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings,
lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums,
subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under
frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance,
attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive
that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the
veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love
yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another
powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your
art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was
pointed to achieve an effect. You were the m