Prejudices: Second Series, Volume 2 |
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Common terms and phrases
absurd actually ęsthetic Alfred Noyes American aristocracy artist banal Beethoven Billy Sunday blood Bret Harte brief Cabell cerebrum chiefly civilized course criticism culture curious death delight democracy democratic disgust doctrine doubt Dreiser effect Emerson England English fact favor fellow first-rate Frank Norris French genuine German Greenwich Village H. L. MENCKEN hear honest human ideas idiotic imagine imbecility inferior inspiration instincts intellectual intelligent James Branch Cabell land late least less literary literature majority ment mind moral native never Nietzsche opera Owen Johnson perhaps plain plutocracy poet poetry political poor whites precisely professors Prohibition Puritanism Rex Beach Richard Strauss right-thinking romantic Roosevelt salient simply Sisson documents sort southern superior theory thing third-rate thought tion to-day Wagner Whitman whole Wilson woman women worse worst write
Popular passages
Page 10 - Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. . . . Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that
Page 66 - assumption that the so-called fashionable folk of the large cities—chiefly wealthy industrials in the interior-decorator and country-club stage of culture—constitute an aristocracy, and by the scarcely less remarkable assumption that the peerage of England is identical with the gentry—that is, that such men as Lord
Page 139 - man, save only Cabell, has come out of it; it is years since an idea has come out of it. The old aristocracy went down the red gullet of war; the poor white trash are now in the saddle. Politics in Virginia are cheap,
Page 138 - The picture gives one the creeps. It is as if •^ the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field. One thinks of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians, Greeks and wild
Page 9 - a short one, is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's celebrated oration, "The American Scholar," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 31st, 1837. Emerson was then thirtyfour years old and almost unknown in his own country, though he had already published "Nature" and established his first contacts with Landor and Carlyle. But "The American Scholar
Page 137 - was there, above all, that some attention was given to the art of living—that life got beyond and above the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarating experience. A certain noble spaciousness was in the ancient southern scheme of things. The UrConfederate had leisure. He liked to toy with ideas. He was hospitable and tolerant. He had the vague thing that we call culture.
Page 76 - pervasive and ill-concealed dread that the mob now heated up against the orthodox hobgoblins may suddenly begin to unearth hobgoblins of its own, and so run amok. For it is upon the emotions of the mob, of course, that
Page 140 - There remains, at the top, a ghost of the old aristocracy, a bit wistful and infinitely charming. But it has lost all its old leadership to fabulous monsters from the lower depths; it is submerged in an industrial plutocracy that is ignorant and ignominious. The mind of the state, as it is revealed to the nation, is pathetically
Page 194 - OF all forms of the uplift, perhaps the most futile is that which addresses itself to educating the proletariat in music. The theory behind it is that a taste for music is an elevating passion, and that if the great masses of the plain people could be inoculated with it they would cease to herd into the moving-picture theaters,
Page 117 - of the Rough Rider, the professional hero, the national Barbarossa. In all this, of course, I strip the process of its plumes and spangles, and expose a chain of causes and effects that Roosevelt himself, if he were alive, would denounce as grossly contumelious to his native purity of spirit—and perhaps in all honesty. It is