It seems only yesterday--and it is only yesteryear--since Walter Pater sat by my side in a Club garden, and listened eloquently to my after-lunch _causerie_, and now he is gone To where, beyond the Voices, there is Peace.You grasp that his eloquence was oracular, silent. He had an air. There was in him--as in his work--a suggestion of aloofness from the homespun world. I suspect he had never heard Chevalier. I should not wonder if he had never even heard of him. He was wrapped in the atmosphere of Oxford, and though "the last enchantments of the...
Essays - Post by : guitara - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1297
"Yes," said Marindin quietly, "they may say they write for Posterity, but what living author besides myself does write for Posterity?" This sounded so unlike Marindin's modesty that I wondered if the port and the paradoxes of our Christmas dinner had got into his head at last. The veteran man of letters had talked brilliantly _more suo_ of many things, most of all perhaps of his dead friend, Charles Dickens. Who seemed more surely to have been writing Christmas stories for Posterity? we had asked ourselves musingly, as we discussed the change of temper since the days when Dickens or Father...
Essays - Post by : stuartforum - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 2215
It was with melancholy amusement that I read in the scientific journals that sewer-gas was comparatively innocuous. After the hundreds of sanitary tracts in which the deadliness of sewer-gas has been an axiom of faith, after the thousand-and-one deaths from it in the contemporary novel, it is grimly diverting to learn that sewer-gas may be welcomed without fear to our hearths and homes. The same process appears to be overtaking science with which we are familiar in the sphere of history--all the bad gases are getting purified and the good spirits vilified. The invincible solids are being liquefied, and the aery...
Essays - Post by : kenneth88 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 2716
Love! Love! Love! The air is full of it as I write, though the autumn leaves are falling. Shakespeare's immortal love-poem is playing amid the cynicism of modern London, like that famous fountain of Dickens's in the Temple gardens. The "largest circulation" has barely ceased to flutter the middle-class breakfast-table with discussions on "the Age of Love" and Little Billee and Trilby--America's "Romeo and Juliet"--loom large at the Haymarket. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, forgetting even Napoleon, his King Charles's head, is ruling high at the libraries with _rechauffes_ of "Some Old Love Stories," and the "way of a man with a...
Essays - Post by : magicthought - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 2134
(_This protest was dated Jan. 1, 1891. Things are rather better now._) I am not a young person. Nothing ever brings a blush to my cheek except the rouge-pencil or the exposure of my stealthy deeds of good I can read the Elizabethan dramatists or Rabelais with equanimity, and the only thing that mars my enjoyment of Juvenal is the occasional obscurity of the Latin. I like the immoral passages in "Mademoiselle de Maupin," even if I do not go so far as Swinburne and call it "the holy book of beauty." Ibsen refreshes me like a tonic, and I even...
Essays - Post by : barnone - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 2935
I have noted in my Sancho Panza moments a number of deficiencies in the commonweal which can only be remedied--in our modern manner--by societies. Let me start with a few of the most needed. 1. SOCIETY FOR PROVIDING NEW OATHS The present currency is badly worn and was always nasty. Swear-words are a necessity. They are the safety-valves of the soul. Why not have them nice and innocent--the kind of oath a girl can use to her mother? It is unfair men should monopolise the bad language. I wonder the Women's Rights women have not sworn about it. I have already...
Essays - Post by : ssimktg2 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1636
The yearning of humanity for the supernatural, even for the pseudo-supernatural, is as pathetic as it is profound. Wherefore I regret that I can make no concessions to it. The following theory of table-turning came to me as I experimented, from my general knowledge of psychology. I have not compared it with the theories of the Psychical Society, which I have never read, preferring to jot down the impressions of an independent observer, which, if they should at all coincide with the explanations of the spook-hunters, will irrefutably demonstrate that their Society was founded in vain. If, moreover, as Mr. Andrew...
Essays - Post by : Katie - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3430
Why do ghosts walk at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that Dickens is responsible for the season, and that Marley's ghost has set the fashion among the younger spooks? The ghost of Hamlet's father was not so timed: he walked in all weathers. Perhaps it is the supernatural associations of Christmas that create the atmosphere in which ghosts live and move...
Essays - Post by : terirhodes - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 2660
My friends, topsy-turveydom is not so easy as it looks. The trouble is not in inverting, but in finding _what to invert_. Our language is full of ancient saws, but it takes wit to discover which to turn upside down. Anybody can stand anything on its head, but it is only the real humourist who knows which thing can stand on its head without falling or looking foolish. 'T is the same in stage dialogue. Many a man of moderate wit can find a repartee when the joke is unconsciously led up to by another speaker. It is the preparation for...
Essays - Post by : lauraw69 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3340
So far as I can gather from the publications of the Folklore Society, the science of Folklore is in a promising condition. The doctors seem to be agreed neither about the facts nor the methods nor the conclusions, but otherwise their unanimity is wonderful. Originally the science was made in Germany it still flourishes, like all sciences that require infinite pains and inexhaustible dulness. All that can be done with any fruitfulness is apparently the collection and classification of stories, songs and superstitions. Hypotheses and theories are mainly bricks without straw, and the only certain conclusion that may be drawn...
Essays - Post by : yasmin - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1058
The Cynic was very old and very wise and very unpopular. I was the only person at his "At Home" that afternoon. I gave him my views on Bi-metallism, having just read the leader in the "Times." He yawned obtrusively, and growled, "Bi-metallism, indeed! The only remedy for modern civilisation is A-metallism. Money must be abolished. The root of all evil must be pulled up." "Money abolished!" I echoed in amaze. "Why, any student of political economy will tell you we could not live without it. Lacking a common measure of value, we----" "So it has always been held by students...
Essays - Post by : DaveMercer - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1035
Now that the world is so full of free dinners for the well-fed, it behoves hostesses to reconsider their methods. With so many dinner-tables open to the lion, or even to the cub, they must do their spiriting dexterously if they would feed him. In these days when seven hostesses pluck hold of the swallow-tails of one man, and the form of grace before meals must be, "For those we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful," something more than the average attraction is needed to induce the noble animal to dine at your expense. There is one improvement...
Essays - Post by : 01ronco - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3396
What is the critic's duty at the play? Does he represent Art, or does he represent the Public? If he represent Art, then he is but a refracting medium between the purveyor and the public, which will therefore be wofully mistaken if it seek in his critiques a guide to its play-going, as it to some extent does. For while people do not always like a play because they are told it is good, they often refrain from going to see one because they are told it is bad. When I was a dramatic critic--a phrase that merely means I did...
Essays - Post by : Voasi - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1655
When I first met the Young Fogey I thought him very brilliant. His philosophical pose, too, of combining the caution of age with the daring of youth was fascinating. "I have evolved," he used to say. "Once I would not attach sanctity to ideas because they were old: now I attach no sanctity to ideas because they are new." But I soon discovered that the Young Fogey was one of that large class of persons who do not evolve but revolve, whose brilliancy is that of the fixed star. They give out arrestive thoughts, and you are vastly impressed, but on...
Essays - Post by : adidas14 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3671
"ENGINEER AND SURVEYOR'S DEPARTMENT. "_5 & 6 Wm. IV., cap. 50, sect. 65._ "SIR, "I am directed to call your attention to the present condition of trees within your premises, which now overhang the public footpath adjoining, and thereby cause considerable inconvenience to the public. I shall be glad if you will kindly give the matter your best attention, with a view to lopping or cutting the trees in such a manner as to obviate the inconvenience at present complained of. "Yours obediently, "P. LEONARDO MACREADY, "_Engineer to the...
Essays - Post by : Brian_Cook - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3537
Without gambling life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon. Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the result, the exultation of winning. And the beauty of gambling is that you cannot lose. Gambling is really a disguised system of purchase. One buys excitement, a most valuable emotion, for which even the members of the Anti-Gambling League are prepared to pay...
Essays - Post by : tayfusion - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3021
The realistic novel, we know from Zola, that apostle of insufficient insight, is based on "human documents," and "human documents" are made up of "facts." _But in human life there are no facts._ This is not a paradox, but a "fact." Life is in the eye of the observer. The humour or the pity of it belongs entirely to the spectator, and depends upon the gift of vision he brings. There are no facts, like bricks, to build stories with. What, pray, in the realm of human life _is_ a fact? By no means a stubborn thing, as the proverb pretends....
Essays - Post by : jordanf - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 3495
Twice in succession has it befallen me to be privately busy in a backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks homing at twilight, as though the course of Nature were still the same, and to see the moonlight rippling over the sombre water at midnight in unaffected tranquillity. Myself was scarcely better informed of the tidal flood: stray echoes of speech, odd fragments of newspaper floated down to me, and...
Essays - Post by : ClickBankJen - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 2636
I wonder if you have ever been struck by the catholicity--not to say the self-contradictoriness--of the constant correspondent. The creature will enter with zest into any discussion; there is no topic too small for it, and certainly none too great. The following letters, carefully culled from the annual contributions of a lady whose epistolary career I have followed with interest, will indicate the delicious inconsequence that has made them for me such grateful reading: 1888. SIR,--There is nothing in life worth purchasing by pulsations and respirations. The world is a dank, malarious marsh, with fitful Will-o'-the-Wisp flashes of false radiance--a vast...
Essays - Post by : the_hack - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1940
It is one of the pleasures of my life that I never saw Tennyson. Hence I am still able to think of him as a poet, for even his photograph is not disillusionising, and he dressed for the part almost as well as Beerbohm Tree would have done. Why one's idea of a poet is a fine frenzied being, I do not quite know. One seems to pick it up in the very nursery, and even the London _gamin_ knows a poet when he doesn't see one. Probably it rests upon the ancient tradition of oracles and sibyls, foaming at the...
Essays - Post by : robinporter - Date : August 2011 - Author : Israel Zangwill - Read : 1303
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