What Is Man? and Other Essays

er is charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I don’t know which it is. But if he said it, I can p

he sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. sustained. I entrench myself behind that protec

erful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when the right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the w

mpression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear

o not mean examine it in a bird’s-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it aloud. I may be wrong,

does not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior of socie

nstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all

. I think it is a model of compactness. When I take its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the result back i

le in the sample is not lonely; there is a plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the one in the middle sentence: “an idealist immersed in realities who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into somethin

take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the words being the right words, none of them

sy marb

ps that h

eir b

mes he lov

carved for

he t

Wendell H

words, and all the same size. We do not notice it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight

Greece and the gran

l, but not any better than now. He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was i

But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder—or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious h

gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wro

n accordance with the policy and business of their profession, come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxati

m upon the aspects of a street of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and progre

lates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on—

photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them,

nd deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways,

ained to the bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn’t said it at all. Other authors’ di

ash from his cigar.” (This expla

no attention to his work; or he would see that there is nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries

all out of the book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and usually irrelevantly. Whenever it is her

ay a thing without crying. They cry so much about nothing that by and by when they have something

nd “halidomes” and similar stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to Mr. Howells’s stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one else’s, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art, and are faithful to the requirements of a stage direction’s proper and lawful off

with a beseeching gesture

following his ges

id, laughin

swiftly upon him that st

answered,

eluctantly

away, and she stood looking into

third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I think. We do not mind one or two deli

d, flipping the as

ed Richard,

red Gladys

Evelyn, bursti

arl, flipping the

the undertaker,

the chamberm

e burglar, burst

ductor, flipping the

d Arkwright,

he chief of pol

e house-cat, bur

ions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of their way, just as the

dmiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but his h