You have nothing but volley
after volley of notes, a musical storm, tempest, avalanche; the
primitive idea is fathoms deep under water, and when it is caught again
it is drowned. Now Monsieur Jules Janin has had for the last
five-and-twenty years the business of executing brilliant variations
upon the piano of dramatic criticism. He acts like the virtuosos you
hear at concerts. He writes, for conscience' sake, the name of the
author and the title of the play at the head of his dramatic report, and
then off he goes, heels over head, with variation and variation, and
variation and variation again, in French and in Latin, until at last no
human being can tell what he is after, where he is going, what he is
talking about, or what he means to say. He will tell you the whole story
of the Second Punic War, speaking of a sentimental comedy played at the
Gymnase Theatre, and a low farce of the Palais Royal Theatre will
furnish him the pretext to quote ten lines of Xenophon in the original
Greek. Monsieur Jules Janin is, notwithstanding all this, an excellent
fellow, and a man of great talents; but you must not ask him to work
miracles; in other words, you must not ask him to express briefly and
clearly what he thinks of the play he criticizes, nor to remember to-day
the opinion he entertained yesterday.
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