The Pathos of Distance: A Book of a Thousand and One Moments |
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Popular passages
Page 122 - There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature : the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. It is the latter that Trollope gratifies, and he gratifies it the more that the medium of his own mind, through which we see what he shows us, gives a confident direction to our sympathy.
Page 39 - ... others that one who, by instinctive sympathy, understood the capacity of his mind, and could evoke it, and who never wearied of it, whether it came to her in elaborately wrought stanzas or in the form of some simple confession, the mood of last night related as they crossed the sward after breakfast. As the moon is more interested in the earth than in any other thing, there is always some woman more interested in a man's mind than in anything else, and willing to follow it sentence by sentence....
Page 95 - ... Wagner's starting-point. What will be matter of surprise to many is the fact that Wagner was no middle-aged student of music, as has been generally understood. He was always studying, only he began earlier than musical histories have told us. He was not a prodigy; he never half mastered the technic of the pianoforte, an instrument which he cursed, yet could never satisfactorily compose unless at the key-board, and sang like a crow. He began with Miiller and ended with Weinlig in theory. He had...
Page 46 - Trollope ! did anybody ever bear a name that predicted a style more trollopy. Anthony, too, in front of it, to make matters worse. And Walter Scott is a jog-trot name, a round-faced name, a snub-nosed, spectacled, pot-bellied name, a placid, beneficent, worthy old bachelor name ; a name that evokes all conventional ideas and formulas, a Grub Street name, a nerveless name, an arm-chair name, an old oak and Abbotsford name ; a name to improvise novels to buy farms with. And Thackeray is a name for...
Page 52 - ... eyes. Perchance a Jew of the Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew as well as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his race favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew is grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery eastern blood, and in his manhood he is — ay, what you see there ! a figure of easy and superb preponderance,...
Page 37 - Russia can do without any one of us, but none of us can do without Russia — one of his sentimental homilies grown wearisome from constant repetition, true, perhaps, of Russia, but utterly untrue of Ireland. Far more true would it be to say that an Irishman must fly from Ireland if he would be himself.
Page 46 - Mishkin (1909) of personal passion, but could personal passion dwell in such a jog-trot name — a round-faced name, a snub-nosed, spectacled, pot-bellied name, a placid, beneficent, worthy old bachelor name, a name that evokes all conventional ideas and formulas, a Grub Street name, a nerveless name, an arm-chair name, an old oak and Abbotsford name? And Thackeray's name is a poor one — the syllables clatter like plates. * We shall want the carriage at half-past two, Thackeray.
Page 39 - Yeats's work must come to her in fragments — a line and a half, two lines — and these she faithfully copies on her typewriter, and even those that his ultimate taste has rejected are treasured up, and perhaps will one day appear in a stately variorum edition.
Page 40 - O'Grady tells that he found Rolleston a West Briton, but after a few lessons in Irish history Rolleston donned a long black cloak and a slouch hat, and attended meetings, speaking in favour of secret societies, persuading John O'Leary to look upon him as one that might rouse the country, going much further than I had ever dreamed of going, O'Grady said.
Page 41 - ... sitting on my side of the table, and I could only catch glimpses of his profile between the courses when he looked up at the waiter and asked him for more champagne, and the sparkling wine and the great yellow skull sloping backwards had seemed a little incongruous. A shape strangely opposite, I said, to Rolleston, who has very little back to his head. All Hyde's head seemed at the back, like a walrus, and the drooping black moustache seemed to bear out the likeness.