Prejudices: Second Series, Volume 2Alfred A. Knopf, 1920 - 254 pages |
Contents
| 201 | |
| 204 | |
| 206 | |
| 208 | |
| 211 | |
| 219 | |
| 222 | |
| 225 | |
| 78 | |
| 87 | |
| 98 | |
| 102 | |
| 136 | |
| 155 | |
| 172 | |
| 180 | |
| 194 | |
| 197 | |
| 226 | |
| 229 | |
| 236 | |
| 238 | |
| 240 | |
| 243 | |
| 244 | |
| 245 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
absurd actually æsthetic Alfred Noyes American aristocracy artist 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 girl Greenwich Village 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 prose 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 Zoë Akins
Popular passages
Page 10 - Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Page 17 - Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.
Page 68 - I hint, is actually bogus, and the evidence of its bogusness lies in the fact that it is insecure. One gets into it only onerously, but out of it very easily. Entrance is effected by dint of a long and bitter struggle, and the chief incidents of that struggle are almost intolerable humiliations. The aspirant must school and steel himself to sniffs and sneers; he must see the door slammed upon him a hundred times before ever it is thrown open to him. To get in at all he must show a talent for abasement...
Page 137 - ... Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.
Page 10 - States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade, than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision...
Page 138 - In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourthrate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays, or a single public monument (built since the war) that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things.
Page 39 - Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction — perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence...
Page 136 - Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now /mythical ether.
Page 75 - Nor has the plutocracy of the country ever fostered an inquiring spirit among its intellectual valets and footmen, which is to say, among the gentlemen who compose headlines and leading articles for its newspapers. What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries pretending to culture is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to...
Page 13 - We shall become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and sharing our light." . . . As I say, the roll of such soothsayers might be almost endlessly lengthened. There is, in truth, scarcely a formal discourse upon the national letters (forgetting, perhaps, Barrett Wendell's sour threnody upon the New England...