So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hil...l; and I turn my periods smoothly and imperceptibly like a skilful wheelwright turning tops in a turning-loom. There's fancy! There's simile!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping t...he turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed--confound 'em!--is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up--so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers--as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic... and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baudelaire compared the great names in art to lighthouses posted along the track of historic time. The simile, as he used it, seiz...es the imagination and represents a great truth, but it allows of an interpretation which the limits of a sonnet form forbade him to develop. He takes the lights of his beacons as much for granted as the sailor does the lights of real lighthouses. But the lighthouses of art do not burn with so fixed and unvarying a lustre. The light they give is always changing insensibly with each generation, now brighter, now dimmer, and often enough growing bright once more. But we sometimes forget that the lights have to be tended or they grow faint and may expire altogether. For them to burn brightly, they must be fed by the devotion of some few spirits in each generation. If that fails for a long period they go out and become one of those dead, ineffectual names which still linger on, obstructions rather than aids to the historical voyager.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendi...d as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and ...>metaphor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Simile and Metaphor differ only in degree of stylistic refinement. The Simile, in which a comparison is made directly between two ...objects, belongs to an earlier stage of literary expression; it is the deliberate elaboration of a correspondence, often pursued for its own sake. But a Metaphor is the swift illumination of an equivalence. Two images, or an idea and an image, stand equal and opposite; clash together and respond significantly, surprising the reader with a sudden light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have no doubt that they lived pretty much the same sort of life in the Homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating t...han of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the "hot bread and sweet cakes;" and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to Asia and Europe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »