Suspense

“ The pain of suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity, when once raised, will account for our eagerness to go quite through an adventure, though we suffer actual pain during the whole course of it. We rather choose to suffer the smart pang of a violent emotion than the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire. ”

“ It is hard to endure nine hours of suspense, but harder still to bear the thought that I have stooped to a deed that would sink me one iota in your good opinion. I will root out the ignoble tendencies of my nature, and keep my heart and lips and hands stainless,—hold them high above the dishonorable things that you abhor, and live during your absence as if your clear eyes took cognizance of every detail. ”

“ But if after, let us say, twenty years of reading fiction, there should suddenly dawn upon our average reader’s mind the idea that as the hero or heroine of a story is always immortal and unconquerable in the end, no matter how circumstances may appear to be against him or her for the moment, would not our skillfully woven suspense suffer a severe jolt? ”

“ We look on with intense agony of suspense, to see whether it will stand the terrible ordeal, and outlive the unexampled convulsion of social elements in which its strength and endurance have been so sorely tested. ”

“ Allowing ourselves, for the most part, to be but vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art; ”

“ The moving accident, the rare conjunction, whatever it be, doesn't make the story—in the sense that the story is our excitement, our amusement, our thrill and our suspense; the human emotion and the human attestation, the clustering human conditions we expect presented, only make it. ”

“ The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful. ”

“ Suspense, one of the best features, in the earlier two-thirds of the story, operates progressively, the cause shifting with the various steps of the action. For example, perhaps the first important question aroused is, “What is Jasper doing all this for?” The second, “Will he succeed in carrying out his well-laid plans?” Meantime, subordinate questions arise, to be satisfied by the author in the unfolding of the narrative. Show that suspense works of necessity less forcibly toward the end, where the outcome becomes more and more inevitable. ”

“ But a suspensive story holds him to one related set of images for a brief space and through this concentration, however simple it may be, he is developing the power of willed attention.
As children grow older, the suspense quality for which we must look in their stories will not consist in repetition of sounds, jingles and phrases, but in their sequence of events leading toward some unknown climax. ”

“ Suspense.—Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject, suspense is the one that most gnaws, and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told, in a very remarkable work lately published by an eye-witness,7 is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five-and-twenty—sufficient to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white. ”

“ In company with the agitations and the dread suspense—the anguish and the tears, which so often wait upon the uncertainties of earthly love, they demand at the hands of the Novelist a final event corresponding to the natural award of celestial wisdom and benignity. ”

“ He is [159] more interested in the suspense that is spread out over an entire action, the tension that gives greater evidence of human shrewdness, and is consequently more agreeable to men of like characteristics and qualifications. ”

“ The feasting and the hunting and the triumph, the wild songs and wilder dances, the fantastic mummeries, the sudden rages, the sudden laughter, the great fires with their rings of painted warriors, the sleepless sentinels, the wide marshes that could not be crossed by night, the leaves that rustled so loudly beneath the lightest footfall, the monotonous days, the endless nights when I thought of her grief, of her peril, maybe,—it was an evil dream, and for my own pleasure I could not wake too soon.
Should we ever wake? ”

“ In the eye of man, or in the sunset clouds, from the sobs of literature, or those of the half-spent tempest, can he fail to read the secrets of fate and time, of an over-credulous hope, a too much bewailed disappointment? ”

“ Then there was a space of silence,—one of those silences in which we seem to be caught up into the heart of things, when hidden meanings are revealed, when the soul stretches itself and grows a little. ”

“ This beautiful work of art “consists of figures grouped together, those nearest the earth bowed down and overwhelmed with the most crushing sorrow; above them are those who are beginning to look upward, and the sorrow in their faces is subsiding into anxious inquiry; still above them are those who, having caught a gleam of the sources of consolation, express in their faces a solemn calmness; and still higher, rising in the air, figures with clasped hands, and absorbed, upward gaze, to whose eye the mystery has been unveiled, the enigma solved, and sorrow glorified.” ”

“ And still I writhed and moaned, "The curse, the curse,
Than animated death, can death be worse?"
"Dark child of sorrow, mine no less, what art
Of mine can make thee see and play thy part?
The key to all strange things is in thy heart." ”

“ And such a calm came o'er that scene,
Where life and revel late had been—
Lone as the quiet of some bay
From which the sea hath ebbed away—
That still I lingered, lost in thought,
Gazing upon the stars of night,
Sad and intent as if I sought
Some mournful secret in their light;
And asked them mid that silence why
Man, glorious man, alone must die
While they, less wonderful than he,
Shine on thro' all eternity.
That night—thou haply may'st forget
Its loveliness—but 'twas a night
To make earth's meanest slave regret
Leaving a world so soft and bright. ”

“ A calm, more dreadful in truth than the tempest, allayed the wild beatings of my heart—a calm like that of the gamester, the suicide, and the murderer, when the last die is on the point of being cast—while the poisoned cup is at the lips,—as the death-blow is about to be given. ”

“ And the wind in the branches whispers, "Why?"
And the yellow leaves that go rustling by,
Say only, "Remember," and sigh,—and sigh.
DREAMS Keep thou thy dreams—though joy should pass thee by;
Hold to the rainbow beauty of thy thought;
It is for dreams that men will oft-times die,—
And count the passing pain of death as nought. ”

“ One rash judgement,—a suspicion unguardedly expressed,—and a character is blasted—it may be a soul lost. A cold look—a frown—and a heart is brighter. A loving glance—a smile—and the destiny of two hearts is fixed for ever. A tear—"One touch of nature makes the world a Kin." ”

“ Thus, when romance has ended in sorrow, and the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and positive forms of life, banished for a time, reappear, and deepen our mournful remembrance of the glories they replace. ”

“ Now silence may brood again; but lovingly, happily, as protecting what is beautiful, not as hiding what is unbeautiful; consciously enfolding a sweet and sacred mystery—august even as the mystery of Death, the dawn as the setting; kindred grandeurs, which to eyes that are opened shed a hallowing beauty on all that surrounds and preludes them. ”

“ Could one lift the impenetrable veil of mystery that hides the future from our curious eyes, what secrets would often be revealed, what shadows would fall upon hearts now light and thoughtless—shadows of grief, of horror, and despair! ”

“ But that veil of darkness which comes down upon the mind of man or woman in the fullness of life, and puts an impermeable mist or a twilight of awful gloom about the soul, is looked upon not only with an exceeding tenderness, but with awe, and as of a bowing of the head before a divine mystery. ”

“ I feel no excitement, rather as if another act in the drama of life was ended, that is all, and that to-morrow I am starting upon a new one which will decide whether the end of the play shall be tragedy or content? ”

“ Here all the fantastic, and all the tragic shapes of imagination have a haunt—where they can neither be invaded or discerned. Here projects, convictions, vows, are confusedly scattered, and the records of past life are laid; and here in solitary state, sits conscience surrounded by her own thunders which sometimes sleep, and sometimes roar, while the world knows it not. ”

“ No scene of pleasurable enjoyment can stand the contrast of such a sight; the revulsion is too sudden and too painful from the light frivolity of mirth to the terrible reality of suffering and sorrow. ”

“ Does the passionate imagination and deep feeling flashing in those dark eyes—the already hectic kindling of that cheek, look with pleasure to long years—a life of cold monotonous routine—of nightly vigils—fastings—of painful mortifications? ”

“ I, however, would say, when we see such objects as these for the first time, the unaccustomed soul has to expand itself; and this gives rise to a sort of painful joy,—an overflowing of emotion, which agitates the mind, and draws from us the most delicious tears. ”

“ Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself 246 why love, the one sweet reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of sorrows—for out of it, in one way or another, whether through gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion? ”

“ What is a passing emotion or half-formed thought to last in so many years of a man's changing, inconsequential life? But what has fixed the emotion of that evening in my recollection so that the slightest shadows remain indelible was an event of strange finality, an event not likely to be forgotten in a life-time—as you shall see. ”

“ Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. ”

“ The events of the tale flow like the stream of fate, regular and irresistible, growing at once darker and swifter in their progress: there is no surprise, no shock: we are prepared for the worst from the very opening of the scene, though we wonder whence the author drew the shadows which render the moral darkness, every instant more fearful, at last so appalling and so complete. ”

“ A delightful moment, followed, as the hunt swished past, by the sudden sense that these men and women, thus whirled off into what may well be the sole poetry of their lives, are but noisy intruders into these fields and spinnies, whose solemn, secret speech they drown with clatter and yelp, whose mystery and charm stand aside on their passage, like an interrupted, a profaned rite. ”

“ Vague and far-off, and fixt as fate,
Which hide from sight that land unknown
Where, ever, like a carven stone
The setting sun doth stand and wait,
And men cry not: "Too late! too late!"
And sorrow turns to a golden gloom. ”

“ O wonderful, various, inscrutable world, what, bliss to be alive in it, even though it be for the briefest moment! But there was a bliss beyond bliss, unspeakable, unimaginable, not to live alone, but to love as the greatest hearts have loved, and surely that was the final message of this magic hour! ”

“ Who so mad as they who rush through their years to vague ends and sordid aims? These flip through the pages of the book of life, missing the sweetness of its wide romance, that they may but know the end of the tale. ”

“ Everyone knows the effect of such a scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance. ”

“ For when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? ”

“ The moment is one of awe—the presence of that mysterious and dreadful-looking object, even while its identity remains doubt, chills the heart—it contracts the expanding thoughts to that one object—all interest in the scene lies centered in that one point. ”

“ It smelled of dust and musty stone, of age and disuse. It was sad. It was solemn. It had the look of a place where silence had become master and was now irrevocable and terrible, and could not be broken. ”

“ Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be expected of the reader. ”