RAPIDITY.

I cannot get on with Mr. ——: not but he is a sensible and a clever man; but then, in thought, delivery, and enunciation, he is so slow!—We start together fairly from the same point, and gain the same end; but he goes by the heavy Birmingham, and I am booked by the mail. One of the great characteristics of modern times is rapidity. A slow development, is in all things, either an evidence of the timidity of ignorance, or a proof of inefficiency and feebleness. This is particularly illustrated in the science of music. The earliest musical compositions which have reached us, are dragging, drawling, monotonous chaunts. Even the “Charmante Gabrielle” of Henri Quatre, and the cavatinas by Salvator Rosa, resemble a modern psalmody.

From Sacchini to Rossini, (no very great interval, by the by) the successive changes in music are all characterized by increasing rapidity. Rossini condenses into a single bar musical ideas, which the masters of the last century would have extended through many phrases. The reiteration, which occurs in the grounds of Purcel, Corelli, &c. &c., is a result of the same cause: one idea in these compositions makes the whole frais of the piece, and is husbanded and worked like a geometrical problem. The compositions of Rossini form an epoch in the history of the most delicious of arts. Rossini is the Voltaire of music. He has given it an impulsion, which the world was ready to receive, but which no preceding composer had the genius or the courage to propose. Paesiello, his predecessor, was the Rousseau of his art. Full of sentiment and eloquence, he was deficient in that force of truth, that energetic vigour of conception, which irresistibly masters the passions of the auditor. We sleep with soft dreams in listening to Paesiello; but we are awakened by Rossini.

People must have spoken more slowly in the time of Queen Elizabeth, than they do now. The cumbrous construction of phrases in the written style of that day, obliges one to read the page of an old author much slower than a modern one. It must have been the same in conversation: there being then fewer ideas in general circulation, the speaker had further to seek for subject matter: the words did not “come skipping rank and file.” There was no ready money of mind in the market, although there were immense masses of unworked ingot, lying in the great bank of the national intellect. There was not then, as now, a ready-made set of conventional phrases, which served to dress up every man’s thoughts, and often to supply the place of thinking; every man was then his own thinker. A rapid speaker, in such a state of things, must have outstripped his hearers. “In all kinds of speech,” (says Lord Bacon) “either pleasant, grave, severe, or ordinary, it is convenient to speak leisurely, and rather drawlingly, than hastily; because hasty speech confounds the memory, and oftentimes, beside the unseemliness, draws a man either to stammering, a nonplus, or harping on that which should follow; whereas a slow speech confirmeth the memory, and addeth a conceit of wisdom to the hearers,—besides a seemliness of speech and countenance.” Here then was the beau-idéal of a good speaker in the time of Queen Elizabeth.

One of the most satisfactory evidences of improvement in the details of civilized life, is the increased rapidity of all its movements. Rapidity is power—omnipotence goes at once to its object, and reaches it. To be slow is to be feeble—to measure human action against time, and to overtake it, is to double existence. To live fast (properly understood) is not to wear out life briefly, but to multiply the sensations which extend it. The more thought, action, intellect, and sensation, can be crammed into this “petty space,” the longer we live: for it is not years, but the consciousness of living, that gives the true longevity.

is therefore the fate of the whole tortoise tribe, whether in or out of their shell.

The events of the American and French revolutions have quadrupled the existence of the generation which witnessed them. More has been done in the last century, than in any three centuries which preceded it.

By rapidity, however, is not intended that description of haste, which is proverbially said to make the worst speed. That which is done imperfectly will require more time to mend, than, if properly bestowed, would have been consumed in its original completion; and as imperfect objects are objects not adapted to their end, to employ them in that state, occasions an equal waste of time in the business of life. The merit of the rapidity of civilization is, that it is combined with a greater perfection in the arts and sciences.

We travel over Macadamized roads, and sail in steam vessels, not only quicker, but safer and more comfortably. The modern speaker is not only more rapid, but clearer, and less exposed to fallacy. Society begins its progress, like life, feebly and slowly; the human intellect develops itself in ponderous poems, of a thousand and one cantos, essays in folios, and “hints,” in quarto. Journeys, in the infancy of society, are made in moving houses, over trackless mountains and “crack-skull commons,” at the rate of ten miles per day.

“Slow and sure,” was a maxim of the wisdom of our ancestors; and (to end with the pleasant farce whence I took the motto for the head of this rapid rhapsody) “keep moving,” should be the epigraph of ours. The “en avant” of Bonaparte set all the old dynasties in a bustle; and but for the whip and the spur, and the “allez, allez” of the French Revolution, we should have their absolutisms still moving their “minuet de la Lorraine.” They have been taught to dance in quicker time, since that important pas grave nearly caused a war in which half Europe was to have taken a part.