The Works of George Meredith, Volume 28C. Scribner's sons, 1912 |
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Adieu Admiral anxious Arthur G August Augustus Jessopp bless BOX HILL Brandreth BURSLEDON Captain Maxse Chapman COPSHAM DEAREST Demitroïa dine DORKING Emilia England English ESHER faithful GEORGE MEREDITH fancy fear feel fellow Fortnightly Fred FRED,-I Frederick Greenwood French Friday Garrick GARRICK CLUB give glad Greenwood hand happy heart honour hope Innsbruck Italy James Cotter Morison Janet Duff Gordon John Morley July lady letter London look Lord loving GEORGE MEREDITH Marie married Marse meet Mickleham mind Miss Morison morning mother nature never night Nonancourt Norwich novel Pall Mall Ploverfield Poco poems poet poor pray Robin Saturday SEAFORD soul speak suppose sure tell things thought Thursday to-morrow Tom Taylor trust truth Tuck Tuesday verse walk Wednesday week wife William Hardman wish write written young
Popular passages
Page 154 - Between realism and idealism, there is no natural conflict. This completes that. Realism is the basis of good composition : it implies study, observation, artistic power, and (in those who can do more) humility.
Page 235 - Look for the truth in everything, and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless...
Page 195 - The Euphuist's tongue, the Exquisite's leg, the Curate's moral sentiments, the British matron and her daughter's purity of tone : — so he talks, so he walks, so he snuffles, so he appears divine. — I repeat with my Grannam, — to think ! — and to hear the chorus of praise too ! Why, this stuff is not the Muse, it 's Musery. The man has got hold of the Muses' clothes-line and hung it with jewelry.
Page 31 - My first sight of the Alps has raised odd feelings. Here at last seems something more than earth, and visible, if not tangible. They have the whiteness, the silence, the beauty and mystery of thoughts seldom unveiled within us, but which conquer Earth when once they are. In fact they have made my creed tremble.— Only for a time. They have merely dazzled me with a group of symbols. Our great error has been (the error of all religion, as I fancy) to raise a spiritual system in antagonism to Nature.
Page 5 - Two highly strung temperaments — man and wife — each imaginative, emotional, quick to anger, cuttingly satirical in dispute, each an incomparable wielder of the rapier of ridicule, could not find domestic content within the narrow bounds of poverty and lodgings.
Page 272 - This is the very spirit of Gothe. I have many times come in contact with it and been ennobled. Fault of mine, if not more! This high discernment, this noblest of unconsidered utterance, this is the Hymn for men. This is to be really prophetlike.
Page 134 - Let men make good blood, I constantly cry. I hold that to be rightly materialist — to understand and take nature as she is — is to get on the true divine highroad.
Page 235 - Stick to a people not at the mercy of their impulses, and besides a people with so fine a literature must be worthy of love. — Captain Maxse wrote to me the other day about an examination in the Foreign Office for the post of Chinese interpreter — for you : if successful to go out to China with a salary of £200 per annum and learn the Chinese tongue of li-ro and fo-ki. I declined it : I hope I was right. I felt sure that it would be repugnant to you to spend your life in China, where the climate...
Page 154 - Idealism is as an atmosphere whose effects of grandeur are wrought out through a series of illusions, that are illusions to the sense within us only when divorced from the groundwork of the real. Need there be exclusion, the one of the other? The artist is incomplete who does this. Men to whom I bow my head (Shakespeare, Goethe; and in their way, Moliere, Cervantes) are Realists au fond. But they have the broad arms of Idealism at command. They give us Earth; but it is earth with an atmosphere.
Page 249 - Belfast address you have seen, no doubt. It has roused the Clergy, Fred. They warned away from science ? They excluded from the chief works of God and told to confine themselves to the field of the emotions ! They affirm that Tyndall is an atheist, and would dare to say he is already damned if the age were in a mood to hear that language. The man or the country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere at present. I foresee a perilous...