Talma's Dumb Show During This Scene
Was A Masterpiece Of The Mimic Art.
If Talma gives such effects to his
roles in a French drama, where he is shackled by rules, how much greater
would he give on the English or German stages in a tragedy of Shakespeare
or Schiller!
Blank verse is certainly better adapted to tragedy than rhymed
alexandrines, but then the French language does not admit of blank verse,
and to write tragedies in prose, unless they be tragedies in modern life,
would deprive them of all charm; but after all I find the harmonious pomp
and to use a phrase of Pope's "The long majestic march and energy divine"
of the French alexandrine, very pleasing to the ear. I am sure that the
French poets deserve a great deal of credit for producing such masterpieces
of versification from a language, which, however elegant, is the least
poetical in Europe; which allows little or no inversion, scarce any poetic
license, no enjambement, compels a fixed caesura; has in horror the
hiatus; and in fine is subject to the most rigorous rules, which can on no
account be infringed; which rejects hyperbole; which is measured by
syllables, the pronunciation of which is not felt in prose; compels the
alternative termination of a masculine or feminine rhyme; and with all this
requires more perhaps than any other language that cacophony be sedulously
avoided. Such are the difficulties a French poet has to struggle with; he
must unite the most harmonious sound with the finest thought.
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