We can detect only the kitsch of our own time. We have trouble imagining what might have appeared in bad taste to someone in the days of Pericles, or Saint Louis. The ubiquity of angels, for example, which delights us in the art of the Middle Ages—wouldn't it have seemed unbearably trite to a sensitive person of that time? And we swoon over ancient terracotta pieces which Verres would have rejected for his concierge's quarters.Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
La vulgarité ne nous frappe que contemporaine. Nous avons peine à nous représenter ce qui pouvait paraître vulgaire à un homme du temps de Périclès ou du temps de saint Louis. Le leitmotiv des anges, par exemple, qui nous enchante dans l'imagerie du moyen âge, ne fit-il pas l'effet à tel contemporain délicat d'un lieu commun insupportable? Et nous adorons des terres cuites antiques dont Verrès n'eût pas voulu pour la loge de son concierge.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Kitsch
Henry de Montherlant (1895-1972), excerpt from Carnet XXI, in his Essais (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963), pp. 1034-1035 (from 1931; my translation):