Background

“ He tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. ”

“ The scene-shifters have been at work all day long, composing and discomposing the beautiful background of the prospect--massing the clouds and scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play with their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise, one behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and of melting blues and greys ”

“ Without dust there would be no blue firmament. The sky would be as dark as or darker than we see it in the finest moonless nights. The glowing disk of the sun would stand immediately upon this dark background, and the same sharp contrast would prevail upon the illuminated surface of the earth—blinding light, where the sun's rays fall, and deep black shadows where they do not. ”

“ With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! ”

“ The various springs from which human action flows, the various types which human crises produce, the virtues and the vices which great historic conflicts heat into activity—all these features of social motion, never jointly reproduced in works of history, are here drawn in vivid colors and present a historic canvas that is prime in the domain of literature. ”

“ Whether outlining with bold pencil strokes or working up the picture from the canvas of environment with subtlest brush touches, how can one hope to convey the idea of a life such as this, gathered out of its past, confirmed for its great future, girded with purpose and panoplied for resistance? ”

“ But if the history of any human soul could be perfectly known, who would wish to describe this passage from the dawn of the ideal to the morning of the real—this transition from life as it is imagined through hopes and dreams to life as it is known through action and submission? ”

“ Their attention to life has changed its character, sharpened its focus: and as a result they see, some a wider landscape, some a more brilliant, more significant, more detailed world than that which is apparent to the less educated, less observant vision of common sense. ”

“ And as the word is the root out of which the whole stem of man’s transmitted knowledge, or tradition, has grown up, with all its branches and offshoots, so, too, in the eloquent speech, in the elegant composition, and even in all lofty internal meditation—which form, as it were, the leaves, flowers, and fruits of this goodly tree of living tradition—it is again the word by which the whole is carried on and ultimately perfected. ”

“ In all I have written I have sought carefully to work into my dialogue each word and sentence recorded of the individual, every available trait or peculiarity of character to be found in contemporary memoirs, every tradition that has come down to us.
To be true to life has been my object. ”

“ My ancestors for generations have been intelligent, godly people, many of them people of distinction. I was born into an atmosphere of love, of intelligence, of spirituality, and of refinement. I have lived in that atmosphere all my life. ”

“ This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes ”

“ Such a comprehensive world, together with the human characterization it embraces, must then pass before us as real in a tranquil stream, without any undue haste, either as positive history or dramatic action, towards its aim and conclusion. ”

“ But our object is, by this edifice, to show our own deep sense of the value and importance of the achievements of our ancestors; and, by presenting this work of gratitude to the eye, to keep alive similar sentiments, and to foster a constant regard for the principles of the Revolution. Human beings are composed, not of reason only, but of imagination also, and sentiment ”

“ Nothing but dulness in the telling could mar the story, for in itself it is the record of the growth of those ideas that have made our race and its civilization what they are; of ideas instinct with human interest, vital with meaning for our race; fundamental in their influence on human development; part and parcel of the mechanism of human thought on the one hand, and of practical civilization on the other. ”

“ I mean the moral and spiritual, reaching beyond the visible—although suggested by, and continually arising out of it—a region in which “the mind that can wander through eternity” may roam at large, calling up historical personages and events long ago forgotten; revelling and luxuriating undisturbed amidst thoughts, feelings, and speculation of other days—holding converse with one’s own heart, and rehearsing scenes long since covered over with the mental dust of our working everyday life. ”

“ Waking the visionary gleams
Around the colder present cast.
Two worlds there are—one, chill and stern,
Is the external world alone,
Whose lessons all mankind must learn,
Whose troubles all mankind have known. ”

“ What is of interest here is not such a motive as possible expression for a view of the world belonging to a more primitive stage in the phase of development, but it is this episode as one of the poetical motives of a novel. ”

“ The names of the persons hum in our ears, and we have some conception of two or three of the incidents; [Pg 164] but the scenes in which they take place, the landscapes, the pastoral images, the idealised country manners, these are what we are thinking of while the story is going on; just as a man should be hearing some local history while going over meadows and stiles, and glancing all the while about him instead of paying it attention. ”

“ On the surface of things there is discord, confusion and want of adaptation; but dig down, first to the centre of the world, and then to the centre of your own nature, and you will find a most wonderful correspondence, a most beautiful harmony, between the two—the world made for the hero and the hero made for the world. ”

“ Could one sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd divergencies—crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and engagingnesses—which may go to make the edifice of an average decent soul's material, mental and spiritual habitation? ”

“ This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself—on its knowledge as well as on its object—in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely what is termed Experience. ”

“ For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. ”

“ These various areas of life—ages of history, localities and circles of activity—may be viewed as being worlds in themselves and as having a life of their own; but that life only shows itself in its results, as for instance, in the prejudices and turns of thought and habits and peculiarities of speech of the members who make up the world. ”

“ Every act is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the life, the destiny,—a most significant, a most tremendous truth: thought on the one hand, life, destiny, on the other. ”

“ Now, suppose by an action of our imagination we step back a few years in our moral history, and re-assume our original characters, what a contrast should we, in that case, exhibit to our present selves! ”

“ In contrast to this view, there is the allocentric outlook which is marked by an 'open encounter of the total person with the world.' Growth, spontaneity and expression are the goals of such an existence. ”

“ And the whole story was composed to lead up to the main point,—the chief point of this history and of all history,—the relentless way in which life moves on, regardless of the individual who falls asleep and is left behind. ”

“ A word—a thought—an unforeseen emotion—an event of paltriest dimensions in itself—may be the germ of an influence wide as a continent, and lasting as a thousand years—may, in fact, change the current and complexion of a person's social history and character, and lead to consequences which shall be durable as eternity. ”

“ The passions, influences, and conditions which generate, shape, and control events lend a coloring to their recital which, deep-lined or faint as painted by the writer at the time, are toned down or made 71stronger by the historian of a future generation who, unmindful of passions, influences, or conditions, and with an eye single to the preservation of history by means of the truth, makes past occurrences stand out in their true light. ”

“ This historic value of the tales, however, great as it is to the student of manners, is secondary to their poetic value, which lies in the sentiment, feeling, and pathos with which the experience of life embodied in them, the workings of simple human nature, in however debased surroundings, is set forth. ”

“ And all is presented with the utmost realism, so grouped round the central figure as to form a perfect historical picture, He and His setting being so built together as to constitute a single organic whole. ”

“ A vivid imagination, a relatively complex society with different traditions, a diversified landscape, an inviting climate, and a leisurely, yet vigorous life were necessary to the highest efflorescence of this poetic power to weave human motives into nature and into the conduct of supernatural powers conceived after the manner of men. ”

“ He grows up in an atmosphere of example and general custom, his life widens out from one little world to other and higher worlds, and he apprehends through successive stations the whole in which he lives, and in which he has lived. ”

“ The present chronicle is an attempt to give an answer, inevitably a very tentative one, to this formidable question; the writer, feeling that, as in all these matters, where the elusiveness of human nature plays so prominent a part, there is more hope of approaching the truth, indirectly, and by means of the imaginative mirror of art, than directly, and by means of rational theorizing. ”

“ The glowing and creative imagination of the boy now found the proper element in which to work, while laws and rules based on nature opened and defined his paths through the boundless regions of the tone world. ”

“ How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men of the new time and in relation to themselves? [Pg 295] What is the will and purpose that these men of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their own? ”

“ We survey the scene that moves around, with a gaze no longer distracted by every hope that flutters by; and it is therefore that we find ourselves more calculated than before for the graver occupations of our race. ”

“ Now that we have examined the aspect of the inward soul-life, which may, at this stage of our inquiry, be presented by art, we must direct our attention to that which lies without it, to the particularity of circumstances and situations which affect character, also to the collisions in which its development proceeds, and finally review the entire collective form, which this inward life assumes within the boundaries of concrete reality. ”

“ Your future is the not yet temporally expressed region wherein you, as finite being, seek your own further expression. That future is still, in one aspect, as we shall see, causally undetermined, precisely in so far as therein something unique, that is yours and yours only, is to appear in the form of various individually designed expressions of your life-purpose, — various individual deeds. ”

“ Now in this mystic, beautifying luminosity, the acquired point of view, the regard for the accepted conventions of every-day seemed to have receded to a great distance, to be thin, forgotten things that had nothing to do with real life. ”

“ Travels, history, biography, autobiographical fragments, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and—to no small degree—fiction, with its stories of out-of-the-way places and out-of-the-way peoples and of unfamiliar classes,—all have been thoroughfares for the social consciousness here. ”

“ An idea comes to me, or I to it', she says, airily, 'a scene—a situation—a young man, a young woman, and on that mental hint I begin to build', but the question naturally arises, she must make a beginning? ”

“ Brain, character, soul—only as one sees more of life does one understand how distinct is each. ”

“ It is to study the succession of events, not as separate units, but as links of one vast chain, on every one of which is inscribed a phrase discoursing of the progress of the human race, and showing the growth of man in the complex, from infancy to adolescence. ”

“ These three views of life are as follows: First, embracing the individual, or the animal view of life; second, embracing the society, or the pagan view of life; third, embracing the whole world, or the divine view of life. ”