| | 303 | Author: | Eaton, Walter Prichard | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Painter of "Diana of the Tides"  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | GIVEN nearly three hundred
square feet of blank
wall space, and it takes
something of an artist to
fill it up with interesting
paint. Probably you
would not pick a miniature
painter for the task.
Yet, curiously, John Elliott, creator of "Diana
of the Tides," the great mural painting which
adorns the large gallery to the right of the
entrance of the new National Museum at Washington,
also paints on ivory. He works, likewise,
in silver point, that delicate and difficult
medium; he draws pastel illustrations for
children's fairy tales; he works in portraiture
with red chalk or oils. And, when the need
comes, he has shown that he can turn stevedore,
carpenter, and architect, to slave with
the relief party at Messina, finally to help
design and build, in four months, an entire
village for the stricken sufferers, including
a hotel, a hospital, three schoolhouses, and
a church. The too frequent scorn of the
"practical man of affairs" for the artist and
dreamer, the world's sneaking tolerance for
the temperament which creates in forms of
ideal beauty rather than in bridges or
factories or banks, finds in the life and work of
such a man as John Elliott such complete, if
unconscious, refutation, that his story should
have its place in the history of the day. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 308 | Author: | Eliot, T. S. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Second-Order Mind | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | TO any one who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of justice,
it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one has
vaguely depreciated for some years. The faults and foibles of Matthew
Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago, after my
first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on rereading some of his
prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position. And what
makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact
contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again. A moderate
number of persons have engaged in what is called "critical" writing, but
no conclusion is any more solidly established than it was in 1865. In the
first essay in the first Essays in Criticism we read that
"it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact
something premature; and that from this cause its productions are
doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which
accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting
than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness
comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without
sufficient material to work with. In other words, the English poetry of
the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative
force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter,
Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so
wanting in completeness and variety." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 309 | Author: | Eliot, T. S. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Possibility of a Poetic Drama | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage
has lost all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are
written which can only be read, and read, if at all, without
pleasure—have become insipid, almost academic. The usual
conclusion is either that "conditions" are too much for us, or that
we really prefer other types of literature, or simply that we are
uninspired. As for the last alternative, it is not to be
entertained; as for the second, what type do we prefer? and as for
the first, no one has ever shown me "conditions" except of the most
superficial. The reasons for raising the question again are first
that the majority, perhaps, certainly a large number, of poets
hanker for the stage; and second, that a not negligible public
appears to want verse plays. Surely here is some legitimate
craving, not restricted to a few persons, which only the verse play
can satisfy. And surely the critical attitude is to attempt to
analyse the conditions and the other data. If there comes to light
some conclusive obstacle, the investigation should at least help us
to turn our thoughts to more profitable pursuits; and if there is
not we may hope to arrive eventually at a statement of conditions
which might be altered. Possibly we shall find that our incapacity
has a deeper source: the arts have flourished at times when there
was no drama; possibly we are incompetent altogether; in that case
the stage will be not the seat, but at all events a symptom, of the
malady. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 315 | Author: | Far, Sui Sin | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Chan Hen Yen, Chinese Student | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | HE was Han Yen of the family of Chan, from the town of Choo-Chow,
in the Province of Kiangsoo. His father was a schoolmaster, so also had
been his grandfather, and his great grandfather before him. He was
chosen out of three sons to be the scholar of the family, and during his
boyhood studied diligently and with ambition. From school to college he
passed, and at the age of twenty, took successfully the examinations
which entitled him to a western education at government expense. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 316 | Author: | Ferber, Edna | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Buttered Side Down | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Any one who has ever written for the magazines (nobody could
devise a more sweeping opening; it includes the iceman who does a
humorous article on the subject of his troubles, and the
neglected wife next door, who journalizes) knows that a story the scene of
which is not New York is merely junk. Take Fifth Avenue as a
framework, pad it out to five thousand words, and there you have
the ideal short story. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 318 | Author: | Ferber, Edna | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Fanny Herself | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without
being aware of Mrs. Brandeis. In a town of ten thousand,
where every one was a personality, from Hen Cody, the
drayman, in blue overalls (magically transformed on Sunday
mornings into a suave black-broadcloth usher at the
Congregational Church), to A. J. Dawes, who owned the
waterworks before the city bought it. Mrs. Brandeis was a
super-personality. Winnebago did not know it. Winnebago,
buying its dolls, and china, and Battenberg braid and
tinware and toys of Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar,
realized vaguely that here was some one different. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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