William Archer

“ It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an absolutely austere economy of means.
Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In The Thunderbolt, for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand, has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his place. ”

“ Cambridge had made something of a half-caste of the high-born, absolute ruler of Rukh—an intellectual half-caste. He had studied a few Western masters profoundly, he had dabbled, and he still dabbled, in abominably many. Your true cosmopolitan is born, not made. He is very rare. Europe had given Rukh’s Raja Gogol and Herbert Spencer, Byron and Aristotle, Goethe and Ben Jonson and Macaulay, the philosophies of Greece and of England, the cultures of France and Spain, the flairs of Mayfair and Rome, but it had taken away more than it had given, had cramped even more than it had developed. ”

“ Others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of Blenkers—an intense and voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters who imitated her—where one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter, and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and some of the magazine editors and musical and literary critics.
Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these persons. They were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one didn't know about in the background of their lives and minds. Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs. ”

“ This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas fils in the preface to La Princesse Georges. "You should not begin your work," he says, "until you have your concluding scene, movement and speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take until you know where you are going?" It is perhaps a more apparent than real contradiction of this rule that, until Iris was three parts finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though Iris is not actually killed. ”

“ The Raja of Rukh was not unmoved. A warm heart beats always under the Oriental mask. Antony Crespin’s widow, there in her peril and loneliness, in his garden, the blossoms she’d filched from it in her hand, had reached it. ”

“ Thus the heaven-storming era is probably over; but there is all the more reason to feel assured that the business centre of Chicago will ere long be not only grandiose but architecturally dignified and satisfactory. A growing thirst for beauty has come upon the city, and architects are earnestly studying how to assuage it. In magnificence of internal decoration, Chicago can already challenge the world: for instance, in the white marble vestibule and corridors of The Rookery, and the noble hall of the Illinois Trust Bank. ”

“ In the meantime, the trees line the avenues in skeleton rows, like a pyrotechnic set-piece before it is ignited. It is useless to pretend, then, that I have seen Washington. The trumpet of March has blown, the pennon of May is not yet unfurled; and even the cloudless sunshine of the past two days has only reduplicated the skeleton trees in skeleton shadows. Washington is not responsible for the tardiness of the spring. It would be unjust to take umbrage at the city because one finds none in its avenues. ”

“ Crespin sat all night on his bed, and thought. He too kept tryst. In such times of crisis and testing every human soul must do that. He thought of his babies, snug asleep now in Pahari while their faithful ayah lay on the floor between the two little beds, and a sentry far off in the cantonment called to some late-comer who had given the password, “Pass, friend. ”

“ I know few spectacles more curious than that which awaits you when you have shot up in the express elevator to the top of the Auditorium tower—on the one hand, the blue and laughing lake, on the other, the city belching volumes of smoke from its thousand throats, as though a vaster Sheffield or Wolverhampton had been transported by magic to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. ”

“ Even the Jewish and the Italian quarters of New York have their portraitists in fiction. Life in Washington has been frequently and ably depicted; for instance, in Mrs. Burnett's Through one Administration. Of the many interpreters of the South I need mention only three: Mr. Cable, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and Mr. Chandler Harris. Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") has made the mountains of Tennessee her special province. Chicago has several novelists of her own: for example, Mr. Henry Fuller, author of The Cliff Dwellers, Mr. Will Payne, and that close student of Chicago slang, Mr. ”

“ With your eyes peppered with dust, with your ears full of the clatter of the Elevated Road, and with the prairie breezes playfully buffeting you and waltzing with you by turns, as they eddy through the ravines of Madison, Monroe, or Adams Street, you take your life in your hand when you attempt the crossing of State Street, with its endless stream of rattling waggons and clanging trolley-cars. New York does not for a moment compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment of its street life. ”

“ Writing of "needless Americanisms," he says, "The use of 'belong' as a new auxiliary verb [an odd classification, by the way] is an example of what we mean. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a stern opponent of such neologisms." I turn to the Oxford Dictionary, and the one quotation I find under "belong" in this sense, is:—"'You belong with the last set, and got accidentally shuffled with the others.'—O.W. Holmes, 'Elsie Venner.'" But this, Mr. Lang may say, is in dialogue. Yes, but not in dialect. I am very much mistaken if the locution does not occur elsewhere in Holmes. ”

“ Are we, in a word, to consider the earth a little rebel state in the gigantic empire of the universe, working out its own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are we to regard God as the Viceroy of the Veiled Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate allegiance is due? ”

“ Like a flight of dragon-flies—gray, far and filmy, the plane-birds came, then like a school of black-bellied fish with backs of gold and rose in the sunset glow, then like some flock of monster well-trained birds, a battalion perhaps of the great rocs the mazed people believed them, nearer and nearer they came, lower and lower they swooped. ”

“ We feel like insects whom the foot of a heedless giant may at any moment crush. We dream of the swish of a comet's tail wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pélée, treating human communities just as an elephant might treat an ant-hill. ”

“ Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus, whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. ”

“ But to apply it throughout a whole quarter of a city, or even throughout the endless vistas of a great American street, would be simply maddening. Better the most heaven-storming or sky-scraping audacity of individualism than any attempt to transform New York into a Fourierist phalanstery or a model prison. ”

“ From where she stood they looked to feather a world of imperial snow and grim stone exquisitely with filmy green. The light was so clear, that every frond showed—and often the fronds were a foot long, but as delicately cut as those in English ferneries. At the base of the crag where the great horn stood a very meadow of them grew—with great trumpet-shaped flowers here and there among them. ”

“ What astounding rapidity of eye and agility of limb it must take to be always at the right spot to catch a little demon of a ball, that tears flashing about the court like a thing possessed! And the men are almost always at the right spot. ”

“ Therefore, while the average Englishman has not studied them sufficiently to realise how much he ought to deplore them, the average American has been taught to dwell upon them as the glorious struggles in which his nation won its spurs. To the juvenile imagination, battles are always the oases in the desert of history, and the schoolboy never fails to take sides fiercely and uncompromisingly, exaggerating, with the histrionic instinct of youth, his enthusiasm and his hatreds. ”

“ As the elephant (or rather the megatherium) to the giraffe, so is the colossal business block of Chicago to the sky-scraper of New York. There is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth buildings of Chicago which is lacking in most of those which form the jagged sky-line of Manhattan Island. For one reason or another—no doubt some difference in the system of land tenure is at the root of the matter—the Chicago architect has usually a larger plot of ground to operate on than his New York colleague, and can consequently give his building breadth and depth as well as height. ”

“ The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an adventure afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the curtain falls on the first act of The Magistrate, we foresee the meeting of all the characters at the Hôtel des Princes, and are impatient to assist at it. ”

“ They were the proudest men in Rukh to-day, for by right of their office well-performed each would claim, and be accorded, privilege to send a girl-child to the Rukh’s harem. Out there close by the great waiting Goddess, close to the spot where the swords would swing and hack at the white offered necks, the three little girls stood side by side dressed in the saffron-edged magenta of brides, their dark little faces golden and shining with joy, each eyeing the other two rather scornfully. ”

“ The sunset glow faded, great stars pulsed green, white and gold in the strip of purple sky between the o’ertopping, high, snow-covered mountains. Dessert in great cut-gold bowls was put on the table. Watkins came and touched a switch, and when the table sparkled with electric lights among the flowers on it, and others above it, came and stood behind his master’s chair. The old major-domo and his white-clad satellites with the Raja’s livery of gold, silver and green twisted in their turbans hovered watchfully round. ”

“ Where would be the interest of a race if its result were a foregone conclusion? Where the passion of a battle if its issue were foreknown? What if we should prove to be somnambulists treading some dizzy edge between two abysses, and able to reach the goal only on condition that we are unconscious of the process? ”

“ And I think it very likely that Tony Crespin took his first drink too much when he heard of his mother’s death.”
“And the women? Inherited from the other side, I suppose?”
“I can’t say, sir. Alcohol itself fathers that lapse very often. And the thing itself is rather too common to lay it overconfidently at any one father’s door.”
“Yes,” Agnew agreed sadly. “Did he say anything?”
“Tony? To me, about what had happened at his home, sir? Not one word—on the way back to Harrow, or after. ”

“ One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city, stretching oceanward between her eastern Sound and her western estuary, and roofed by a radiant dome of smokeless sky. ”

“ We misunderstand because we understand; and it would be an extravagance of pessimism to doubt that, in the long run, understanding will carry the day. Light may dazzle here and bewilder there; but, after all, it is light and not darkness. ”

“ We were now in the boot- and harness-making division of the Trade School building. Pursuing 122the theme of thoroughness suggested by the anecdote of Booker Washington, Dr. Turner continued—
Principles and Methods. “We insist that every student shall become highly skilled in whatever trade or pursuit he takes up; but we allow him to acquire a partial and rough-and-ready knowledge of other crafts subsidiary to his own. For instance, it is found that the individual harness-maker cannot compete with factory work, so that few students now take a complete course in that craft ”

“ There were scant wild flowers in Rukh, but each that there was lifted up a glad, gay face. There are few song-birds in the Himalayas, but a lark sang and swayed on the spear-shaped lace of a green bamboo, and a choir of thrushes throated up a silver carol of song from the full-berried rowans. Yellow sunshine lay in unbroken, imperial swathes everywhere. Children laughed and pranked, women sang at their tasks—none doing more than she must to-day—men smoked and walked about arm in arm. ”