English Literature During the Last Half Century |
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admirable artistic beauty British Brooke Butler career characters charm Conrad contemporary criticism death Douglas Hyde dramatic Dublin edition England English Erewhon Erewhonians essays father fiction Galsworthy genius George Eliot George Meredith gift Gissing Gissing's give Hardy Hardy's human humour Ibsen ideas imagination intellectual interest Ireland Irish J. M. Synge John Joseph Conrad Kipling Lady Lady Gregory Lascelles Abercrombie later less literary literature live London Lord Jim marriage Masefield ment merely mind modern moral movement nature never novel novelist passion perhaps personality play poems poet poetry political popular produced prose published R. L. Stevenson readers romance Rupert Brooke Samuel Butler says seems sense Shaw Shaw's social spirit Stevenson success sympathy Synge Theatre theory things Thomas Hardy thought tion verse Victorian volume W. B. Yeats Wessex woman women write written wrote young youth
Popular passages
Page 151 - Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
Page 88 - Requiem Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
Page 163 - Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
Page 160 - My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see...
Page 243 - Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road, The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad, The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load. The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout, The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out.
Page 39 - Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.
Page 230 - When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kichen.
Page 8 - Believing, as I do, in the continuity of Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.
Page 38 - Has some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? "Or come we of an Automaton Unconscious of our pains? . . . Or are we live remains Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone? 20 "Or is it that some high Plan betides, As yet not understood, Of Evil stormed by Good, We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?
Page 205 - A drama must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and character has its inherent moral; and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day.