A Commentary

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G.P. Putnam's sons, 1908 - English essays - 263 pages
 

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Page 236 - Providence who — after hesitating long to educate him lest this should make his parents paupers — now compelled his education, having first destroyed his stomach, that he might be incapable of taking in what he was taught. That small white creature could not as yet have grasped the notion that the welfare of the Future lay, not with the Future, but with the Past. He only knew that every day he went to school with little in his stomach, and every day came back from school with less. All this he...
Page 236 - To reconcile this apathy of his with recollections of his unresting, mirthless energy down alleys and on doorsteps, it was needful to remember Human Nature, and its exhaustless cruse of courage. For, though he might not care to live, yet, while he was alive he would keep his end up, because he must — there was no other way. And why exhaust himself in vain regrets and dreams of things he could not see, and hopes of being what he could not be! That he had no resentment against anything was certain...
Page 146 - This, then, is the medicine you have mixed, my little man, to cure the pain of your fevered souls. Well done! But if you had not left me you would have had no fever ! There is none in the wind and the stars and the rhythm of the sea ; there is none in green growth or fallen leaves ; in my million courses it is not found. Fever is fear — to you alone, my restless mannikin, has fever come, and this is why, even in your holiday, you stand in your sick crowds gulping down your little homoeopathic draughts!
Page 183 - Only that, an' what was goin' on outside, with me there buried-up alive. You tell me that ther' solitude ought to ha' done a lot for me, an' so it did. I ain't never been the same man since. Well, when I came out I made a big mistake, I find, to have that sentence up against me, in the earnin' of me livin' honest, like as though I 'd never been in prison. I oughtn't to 'ave been a carpenter, I guess, or anythin...
Page 178 - God 6f prisoners ; this is his debauch of speech. Then, on his avid ears the words of the preacher fall; and motionless, row on row he sits, in the sensual pleasure of this sound.
Page 185 - ve been — an out-an'-outer, as you can see with lookin' at me now. An' if you ask me what I think of all o' you outside, I can't reply, seein' I 'm not allowed to speak." This is the answer that they seem to make, their lips move, but no sound comes. The warder watches these moving lips, his eyes, the eyes of a keeper of wild beasts, are saying: "Pass on, sir, please, and don't excite the convicts — you have seen all there is to see!
Page 182 - Guv'nor! You tell me I did wrong to get in here, brought up like I was — born in the purple — Brick Street, 'Ammersmith. My father was never up against the police; epileptic fits is what he went in for — I oughtn't to have had him for a father; I oughtn't to have had a mother that liked her drop o' trouble, leavin' me what you might call violent from a child.
Page 238 - The future of the Race" watched him for a minute without moving, and suddenly he laughed. That laugh was a little hard noise like the clapping of two boards — there was not a single drop of blood in it, nor the faintest sound of music. So might a marionette have laughed — a figure made of wood and wire. And in that laugh I seemed to hear innumerable laughter; the laughter in a million homes of the myriad unfed. So laughed the Future of the richest and the freest and the proudest race that had...
Page 181 - ... apportioned to your strength. Corporal punishment we shall very seldom use. Lest you should give us trouble, and contaminate each other, you shall be silent, and, as far as possible, alone. You sinned against Society; your minds were bad; it were better If In our process you should lose those minds'. For some reason which we cannot tell, you had but little social Instinct at the start, that little social Instinct soon decayed. Therefore, through bitter brooding and eternal silence, through horror...
Page 108 - I shall lose my money," would leap to his lips ; but in the dark it seemed ridiculous to speak them. Presently beside that doubt more doubts would squat. Doubts about his other houses, about his shares; misgivings as to Water Boards; terrors over Yankee Rails. They took, fantastically, the shape 107 of owls, clinging in a line and swaying, while from their wide black gaps of mouth would come the silent chorus: "Money, money, you '11 lose all your money!

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