Word: nineteenth
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When the Romantic movement became too saccharine, it was dispatched from the world with some promptness. It takes a genius to be convincingly romantic. The nineteenth century gave birth to Tennyson, Keats, Shelley and a few others, but as the years wore on these men dies, and the century, full of honorable years, could produce no more to take their places. As a result men grew tired first of the lesser poets who labored and brought forth exceedingly diminutive mice and then of the whole movement and what it stood...
...Contemporary Art will present its first exhibition of the season with a display of paintings, tracing the development of modern painting since Impressionism. The object of the exhibition is not so much to display individual paintings as to show the logical transformation in style since the end of the nineteenth century. Great artists who, by some specific contribution, pushed forward the new tradition will be represented by those paintings which best illustrate their place in the movement...
...especially important for work in the plastic and pictorial arts, for action and reaction are apt to follow so swiftly at each other's heels that it becomes difficult to preserve the best of the old in the new. Art becomes petrified in ceaseless change. Especially since the nineteenth century the liberation of art has tended to become its libertinage. The historical view can be among the best of those reality-correctives which determine the fine balance between technique and substance...
...beginning of the nineteenth century two earnest young men set out to write a book of poetry. The world stared back down the alley of the 1790's shivering. Napoleon was squinting in the sunlight as the nations stacked their guns before him. A handsome Austrian with a hooked nose sat devising a system founded upon those grievances against which Robespierre had hurled a reign of terror. The past lay in the burying ground of dead ideas. The present was a battlefield. There was no future...
...flourished a thousand years ago is hardly a feasible antidote, it will be interesting to see what manner of men our ancestors were and in what fashion they were able to achieve a calm and order which appealed to one of the most able and sensitive minds of the nineteenth century...