Reviewing bad books, W. H. Auden once remarked, is bad for the character. Like all gifted moralists, Auden idealized despite himself, and he should have survived into the present age, wherein the new commissars tell us that reading good books is bad for the character, which I think is probably true. Reading the very best writers-let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy-is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.
From Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon.
Designed by Keith Sheridan. This is the 1978 edition, from Aventura: the Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature.
Mr. Icky
The Quintessence of Quaintness in One Act
by F.Scott Fitzgerald
The Scene is the Exterior of a Cottage in West Issacshire on a desperately Arcadian afternoon in August. MR. ICKY, quaintly dressed in the costume of an Elizabethan peasant, is pottering and doddering among the pots and dods. He is an old man, well past the prime of life, no longer young, From the fact that there is a burr in his speech and that he has absent-mindedly put on his coat wrongside out, we surmise that he is either above or below the ordinary superficialities of life.
_Near him on the grass lies PETER, a little boy. PETER, of course, has his chin on his palm like the pictures of the young Sir Walter Raleigh. He has a complete set of features, including serious, sombre, even funereal, gray eyes—and radiates that alluring air of never having eaten food. This air can best be radiated during the afterglow of a beef dinner. Be is looking at MR. ICKY, fascinated._
Silence. . . . The song of birds.
PETER: Often at night I sit at my window and regard the stars. Sometimes I think they’re my stars…. (Gravely) I think I shall be a star some day….
ME. ICKY: (Whimsically) Yes, yes … yes….
PETER: I know them all: Venus, Mars, Neptune, Gloria Swanson.
MR. ICKY: I don’t take no stock in astronomy…. I’ve been thinking o’ Lunnon, laddie. And calling to mind my daughter, who has gone for to be a typewriter…. (He sighs.)
PETER: I liked Ulsa, Mr. Icky; she was so plump, so round, so buxom. Continue reading “Mr. Icky, a one-act play by F. Scott Fitzgerald”
(From An English Grammar, Baskervill & Sewell, 1895):
Exercises on the Moods.
(a) Tell the mood of each verb in these sentences, and what special use it is of that mood:—
1. Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart and her prayers be.
2. Mark thou this difference, child of earth! / While each performs his part, / Not all the lip can speak is worth / The silence of the heart.
3. Oh, that I might be admitted to thy presence! that mine were the supreme delight of knowing thy will!
4. ‘Twere worth ten years of peaceful life,One glance at their array!
5. Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice.
6.The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve / And use it for an anvil till he had filled / The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts.
7.Meet is it changes should control / Our being, lest we rust in ease.
8.Quoth she, / “The Devil take the goose, / And God forget the stranger!”
9. Think not that I speak for your sakes.
10. “Now tread we a measure!” said young Lochinvar.
11. Were that a just return? Were that Roman magnanimity?
12. Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of.
13. He is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no literary man.
14. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these flagrant points compose! Continue reading “Exercises on the Moods”
Biblioklept 