The Prospects of LiteratureL. & Virginia Woolf, 1927 - 34 Seiten |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
able to produce abundant achievement ambition animating motive artist belief better BONAMY DOBRÉE BRITAIN BY NEILL contem contemporaries create one's crown dawn delicate delight in playing desire diction and style disillusion DRYDEN eager easy EDINBURGH embodied enduring fame epoch experience favourable Flaubert formulas France full of encouragement genius gifts gloire Greeks Hazlitt highest excel ideal immediate success immortal improvisation incentive inspiration kind la gloire labour least leisure LEONARD WOOLF linguistic literary creation live LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH love fame love of fame masterpieces means medium mortality nition noble mind nobler obscurity passion perhaps phrase plastic pleasure POETRY poets popular priggish PROSPECTS OF LITERATURE reading recog renunciations ripening ROBERT GRAVES ROGER FRY Romantic revivals says seems full seldom Shakespeare spirit talent tell the truth things thinking thought tion to-day unfavourable unhackneyed UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN vainglorious VIRGINIA WOOLF vocabulary words young writer younger
Beliebte Passagen
Seite 30 - But excellence is not common and abundant ; on the contrary, as the Greek poet long ago said, excellence dwells among rocks hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear his heart out before he can reach her.
Seite 30 - I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.
Seite 34 - Fame, as a noble mind conceives and desires it, is not embodied in a monument, a biography, or the repetition of a strange name by strangers; it consists in the immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world. When Horace — no model of magnanimity — wrote his exegi monumentum, he was not thinking...
Seite 9 - ... Romantic revivals in those countries — and these were the greatest epochs of literary creation — men shared in common certain convictions which they took more or less for granted; and it was the coherence of their beliefs and ideals, the grandiose completeness, rather than the ultimate truth, of their scheme of things, which gave them that imaginative dominion over experience which produces greatness.
Seite 18 - ... ripens to no fulfilment ; each subsequent work tends to be a feeble replica and fainter echo of the first. In recent years, and especially since the war, similar conditions have prevailed in France and in America; in these countries, as in England, the number of miscarriages of talent, the rate of infant mortality among gifts of promise, seems to be ever increasing. And, indeed, with all the advertisement and premature publicity of our time, where can we hope to find that leisurely ripening of...
Seite 17 - ... goose whose golden eggs they live on. As soon as a young author makes a success his publisher urges him to repeat it at once ; other publishers are eager to win his patronage, and he is not infrequently offered a fixed income on the condition that he shall regularly provide one or two volumes a year. It would be invidious to mention names, but in following the careers of the more recent writers whose first books have charmed me, I almost invariably find that their earliest publications, or at...
Seite 18 - ... the number of miscarriages of talent, the rate of infant mortality among gifts of promise, seems to be ever increasing. And, indeed, with all the advertisement and premature publicity of our time, where can we hope to find that leisurely ripening of talent in the shade of obscurity, that slow development by experiment and failure, by which it can best be mellowed and matured? No; the old, hard conditions were surely better. It was much better to stone the prophets than to crown them, as we now...
Seite 21 - ... life, or had solved some perplexing problem, or had aptly expressed, it may be, some meaning of my own, giving importance to my private thought, and making it more true and lucid. In any case, back through all the books I have been reading, I must search for that lost phrase until again I find it. Je trouve au coin d'un bois le mot qui m'avoit fui — * This line of Boileau's is the latest of these recaptures; and now that I have read it again in the epistles of that " old bewigged poet, it creates...
Seite 34 - ... votes, kept the Liberal Party out of office — except for a brief interval — for thirty years. It was courage and character that made Mr. Gladstone not only a political giant, but a dominating influence all over Europe, and I will end this chapter by quoting what Hazlitt writes upon fame. " Fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude ... it is the spirit of man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable.
Seite 17 - H and finding ready at hand a plastic medium in which to embody his imaginations, is sometimes able to produce abundant masterpieces, one after the other, and to write down without care pages which are destined to endure for ever. But these fortunate epochs occur so rarely, and these great unscrupulous artists who, like Shakespeare or Moliere, can cater for the market without harm, and blamelessly worship the golden calf on the highest peaks of Parnassus, are so divinely gifted and so exceptional,...