| | 82 | Author: | Bicknell, Percy F. | Add | | | Title: | The Pugnacious Style  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | It is the nature of man to love a good hater; at any rate, a
considerable part of mankind pays him the tribute of admiration for
the vigor and constancy of his animosity. In like manner the
reading world enjoys the aggressive energy and the keen stabs, or
sledge-hammer blows, of him who writes with the intent of
annihilating a foe or exploding a false doctrine; and this in spite of
the fact that little of worth in the cause of truth and justice has ever
been effected by passionate vehemence of style, no wrong-headed
person has ever been bullied into reasonableness, and no enemy has
ever been crushed by mere force of vituperation. As is illustrated
every week and every day in the heated discussions that in these
fevered times claim so much space in our newspapers and
magazines, and even in our books, the controversialist falls easily
into the error of hurting his cause by undue warmth of manner, and
repels by intemperance of speech where he might win by
moderation and restraint. If it be true, as experience inclines one to
believe, that nobody was ever convinced by argument who was not
already more than half persuaded, it is doubly true that no
prejudiced person was ever induced by vituperation to renounce his
prejudice and alter his opinions. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 83 | Author: | Bierce, Ambrose | Add | | | Title: | My Favorite Murder | | | | Published: | 1993 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | HAVING murdered my mother under
circumstances of singular
atrocity, I was arrested and put
upon my trial, which lasted
seven years. In charging the jury, the judge
of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was
one of the most ghastly crimes that he had ever
been called upon to explain away. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 84 | Author: | Bland, Henry Meade | Add | | | Title: | Jack London | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | JACK LONDON has, perhaps as no other American author, put his own
life into his books. He has lived his art. It is this feature of
London's work that makes one ready to prophesy that his sojourn as war
correspondent at the seat of the great conflict between Russia and Japan
will result in, unless the drudgery of newspaper hack-work interferes,
at least one new volume of powerful delineation of life. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 86 | Author: | Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375 | Add | | | Title: | The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love / by Giovanni Boccaccio | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FLORIO, surnamed Philocopo, accompanied with the
duke Montorio, Ascaleon, Menedon and Massalina,
in sailing to seek his friend Biancofiore, was through
a very obscure and dark night by the fierce winds driven into
great dangers. But the perils once passed, they were cast into
the port of the ancient Parthenope, whereas the mariners
(espying themselves in a haven) received comfort. Not
knowing into what coast fortune had forced him they yielded
thanks to the gods and so tarried the new day, the which
after it once appeared the place was of the mariners descried,
so that they all glad of suretie and of so acceptable arrival,
came ashore, Philocopo with his companions. Who rather
seemed to come forth new-risen again out of their
sepulchres than disbarked from ship, looked back towards the
wayward waters and repeating in themselves the passed
perils of the spent night, could yet scarcely think themselves
in suretie. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 87 | Author: | Boethius | Add | | | Title: | The Consolation of Philosophy (Trans. W.V. Cooper, 1902) | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | 'To pleasant songs my work was erstwhile
given, and bright were all my labours then;
but now in tears to sad refrains am I
compelled to turn. Thus my maimed Muses guide
my pen, and gloomy songs make no feigned tears
bedew my face. Then could no fear so
overcome to leave me companionless upon my way.
They were the pride of my earlier bright-lived
days: in my later gloomy days they are the
comfort of my fate; for hastened by
unhappiness has age come upon me without warning,
and grief hath set within me the old age of her
gloom. White hairs are scattered untimely on
my head, and the skin hangs loosely from my
worn-out limbs. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 89 | Author: | Bonner, John Stuart | Add | | | Title: | A Master Sold by a Slave | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | ONE of the most successful negro speculators on the Peninsula in
the forties was a man named James Hubbard, who lived upon his own
estate near Yorktown, and was accounted one of the wealthiest men
in those parts. He was a man of powerful physique and coarse
manners. His hair and eyes were intensely black, and his
complexion so swarthy that he would have suffered by comparison
with many of the human chattels he dealt in. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 91 | Author: | Bourne, Randolph | Add | | | Title: | The Art of Theodore Dreiser | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune
to evoke a peculiar quality of pugnacious interest among
the younger American intelligentsia such as has
been the lot of almost nobody else writing today unless
it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature
seriously enough to quarrel over it.
Or else we take it so seriously that we urbanely avoid squabbles.
Certainly there are none of the vendettas that rage in a culture
like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems
to have made himself, particularly since the
suppression of "The 'Genius,'" a veritable
issue. Interesting and surprising are the
reactions to him. Edgar Lee Masters makes
him a "soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking the
earth, stalking life"; Harris Merton Lyon saw
in him a "seer of inscrutable mien"; Arthur
Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing
throng of figures, "labored with immortal illusion, the
terrible and beautiful, cruel and
wonder-laden illusion of life"; Mr. Powys
makes him an epic philosopher of the "life-tide";
H. L. Mencken puts him ahead of Conrad, with
"an agnosticism that has almost
passed beyond curiosity." On the other
hand, an unhappy critic in the "Nation" last
year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time
in a neat antithesis between the realism that
was based on a theory of human conduct and
the naturalism that reduced life to a mere
animal behavior. For Dreiser this last special
hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and
simian activities of his characters rather exhaustively outlined.
At the time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of
Mr. Dreiser's latest book, "A Hoosier Holiday," it becomes nonsensical.
For that wise and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic
of very common human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic,
with an artist's vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 92 | Author: | Boughton, Willis, 1854-1942 | Add | | | Title: | "The Negro's Place in History" | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | During the life of mankind every generation has been
confronted with one or more grave social questions the solution of
which seemed, at the time, to be of vital importance to the
progress of civilization. So, too, every age has had its
alarmists, who have preached wars and desolation and the utter
destruction of existing institutions. But civilization has moved
onward. Every age and every generation has indeed proved equal to
its emergencies. Though the champions of a principle be tried by
the crucial test of wars, though French revolutions and American
rebellions enact their bloody scenes, the fittest survives, the
most vigorous principle conquers, the world advances in culture.
Only the extreme pessimist will deny that the world is to-day
better than it has ever been before, that people are more cultured,
more humane, more Christ-like. The nations of our day are better
able to grapple with difficult social problems than were their
ancestors. Under the most threatening portents there is no
occasion for undue alarm. Regulated by the laws of universal
progress, the right principle will, in the end, prevail, for
mankind will not rush madly onward to the destruction of cherished
institutions. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 93 | Author: | Boyce, Neith | Add | | | Title: | The Novel's Deadliest Friend | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | About a century has passed since woman's fondness began to
spoil the English novel. Up to Fielding's day, it appears, some
good fortune preserved the lusty youth of Fiction from woman's
blighting eye; or perhaps the simple appetite of youth made a
defence, as the roast of beef and the flagon of ale protected Tom
Jones from the blandishments of the strange lady in the inn. But
this protection likewise was only temporary; and Fielding,
Thackeray said in tears, was the last novelist in England "that
dared to paint a man." Thackeray went away from an interview with
his editor, with that remark, to write into Pendennis those
paragraphs which preserve the hero's virtue—and ever since
masculine heroes have been made to fit feminine ideals. Woman
never has liked the Tom Jones type of hero—the conquering,
destroying, self-indulgent young animal. She likes splendour and
dash, but still demands that the hero shall represent somehow the
idea of self-sacrifice, of mortification of the flesh, and above
all, of constancy. It was Thackeray, again, who said that woman
would forgive Nero all his other sins if only he had been a good
family man. And this fits in with what Count Tolstoy has said
recently, that woman is less noble, less self-sacrificing, than
man, since man will sacrifice his family for an idea, while woman
won't. It seems, then, to be fairly well established that the
heights of self-sacrifice are beyond woman. And in imposing her
lower ideals upon the novel she has done the harm that male
novelists still deplore. As she has prevented the hero of the
novel from soaring to the lonely peaks which she can't reach
herself, so also she forbids him to ramp through the pleasant
meadows, witlessly enjoying himself. She condemns him to stern
probation and as many labours as Hercules had, and all to what end?
That he may kneel at her feet for his reward. The modern novel
simply flatters woman's egregious vanity. But what to do about it?
How to prevent woman reading and buying books? As long as she does
so the manful efforts of the novelist to uphold his art must come
to naught. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 94 | Author: | Brawley, Benjamin | Add | | | Title: | The Negro in American Fiction | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Ever since Sydney Smith sneered at American books a hundred years ago, honest critics
have asked themselves if the literature of the United States was not really open to the charge of
provincialism. Within the last year or two the argument has been very much revived; and an
English critic, Mr. Edward Garnett, writing in "The Atlantic Monthly," has pointed out that with
our predigested ideas and made-to-order fiction we not only discourage individual genius but
make it possible for the multitude to think only such thoughts as have passed through a sieve.
Our most popular novelists, and sometimes our most respectable writers, see only the sensation
that is uppermost for the moment in the mind of the crowd, — divorce, graft, tainted meat or
money, — and they proceed to cut the cloth of their fiction accordingly. Mr. Owen Wister, a
"regular practitioner" of the novelist's art, in substance admitting the weight of these charges,
lays the blame on our crass democracy which utterly refuses to do its own thinking and which is
satisfied only with the tinsel and gewgaws and hobbyhorses of literature. And no theme has
suffered so much from the coarseness of the mob-spirit in literature as that of the Negro. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 96 | Author: | Bradford, Gamaliel | Add | | | Title: | An Odd Sort of Popular Book | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | MULTIPLICITY of editions does not
make a book a classic. Otherwise Worcester's
Dictionary and Mrs. Lincoln's
Cook-Book might almost rival Shakespeare.
Nevertheless, when a work
which has little but its literary quality to
recommend it achieves sudden and permanent
popularity, it is safe to assume
that there is something about it which will
repay curious consideration. As to the
popularity of The Anatomy of Melancholy
there can be no dispute. "Scarce any
book of philology in our land hath, in
so short a time, passed through so many
editions," says old Fuller; though why
"philology"? The first of these editions
appeared in 1621. It was followed
by four others during the few years preceding
the author's death in 1640. Three
more editions were published at different
times in the seventeenth century. The
eighteenth century was apparently contented
to read Burton in the folios; but
the book was reprinted in the year 1800,
and since then it has been issued in various
forms at least as many as forty times,
though never as yet with what might be
called thorough editing. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 97 | Author: | Brackett, Anna C. | Add | | | Title: | The Strange Tale of a Type-Writer | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | I HAD a favorite type-writer — I will not say of whose
manufacture — with which, through much use of it, I became very
intimate. That expression I use boldly, because everybody knows
already that many among modern machines have a definite character,
and that even individual character is observed in those of the same
sort. The engine-driver, for example, will tell you that each
locomotive of a lot made to be precisely similar will be found to
have, so to speak, its own temperament and manner, and that he
becomes attached to his own engine as to a person. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 98 | Author: | Brown, Alice | Add | | | Title: | Bachelor's Fancy | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | CYNTHIA GALE sat by the window in
the long shed chamber, her hands at momentary
ease. She was a slight, sweet
creature. with a delicate skin, and hair
etherealized by ashen coverts. Her eyes
were dark, and beauty throbbed into
them with drifting thoughts. Cynthia
was tired. She had been at work at
the loom since the first light of day, and
now she had given up to the languor of
completed effort, her head thrown back,
her arms along the arms of the chair,
in an attitude of calm. Her hair had
slipped from its coil, and fallen on
either side of her face in gentle disarray.
She was very lovely. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 100 | Author: | Brodhead, Eva Wilder | Add | | | Title: | The Eternal Feminine | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | A faint smile glimmered across Mrs. Herritt's fair, faded face as
she sat on her porch in the waning light of the October afternoon,
rocking tranquilly, and regarding with suave interest a certain
active little scene which the main street of the Colorado town
presented. She sat long and lax in the low chair. About the soft
attenuation of her figure the folds of a daintily sprigged print
gown fell loose and starchless, with an effect frankly free of any
pretension either esthetic or modish. There was a similar accent,
artless and unfashionable, in the slack, smooth coiling of Mrs.
Herritt's heavy light hair, in which a dull fawn tint was subduing
the yellower hue of youth. She had, upon the whole, the air of one
more solicitous to please herself than the public, and the innocent
blueness of her eyes, though a little frustrated of convincing
candor by reason of the triangular droop of the lids, still added
to her outward person a final note of unaspiring simplicity. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
|
