The works of great artists are silent books of eternal truths. And thus it is indelibly written in the face of Balzac, as Rodin has graven it, that the beauty of the creative gesture is wild, unwilling and painful. He has shown that great creative gifts do not mean fullness and giving out of abundance. On the contrary the expression is that of one who seeks help and strives to emancipate himself. A child when afraid thrusts out his arms, and those that are falling hold out the hand to passers-by for aid; similarly, creative artists project their sorrows and joys and all their sudden pain which is greater than their own strength. They hold them out like a net with which to ensnare, like a rope by which to escape. Like beggars on the street weighed down with misery and want, they give their words to passers-by. Each syllable gives relief because they thus project their own life into that of strangers. Their fortune and misfortune, their rejoicing and complaint, too heavy for them, are sown in the destiny of others-man and woman. The fertilizing germ is planted at this moment which is simultaneously painful and happy, and they rejoice. But the origin of this impulse, as of all others, lies in need, sweet, tormenting need, over-ripe painful force.
Verlaine was always only a human being, a weak human being, who did not even know how "to count the transgressions of his own heart." It was this very lack of individuality, however, which produced something much rarer-the purely and entirely human. Verlaine was soft clay without the power of producing impresses and without resistance. Thus every line of life crossing his destiny has left a pure relief, a clear and faithful reproduction, even to the fragrance-like sorrows of lonely seconds which in others fade away or thicken into dull grief. The tangled forces which tempestuously shook his life and tore it to tatters crystallized in his work and were distilled into essences.
This book presents the Story of the Greatest French Writer: Moliere. "Among the many great names which make French literature illustrious, there is scarcely one which is so universally acknowledged and of such national importance as that of Moliere. The graver poets, of whose works Frenchmen are proud, and whose names stand first on the register of fame, do not wake the same warmth of interest and sympathy which make Moliere always living, always popular, the familiar friend as well as the immortal writer dear to his countrymen, with no solemnity of classical fame alone, but with the warmth almost of personal contact...
This book deals with the life and character of John Stuart Mill, British philosopher, political economist and civil servant one of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism. "I propose to review the life and character of John Stuart Mill. In addition to what all the world may know, I am aided by personal recollections extending over the second half of his life, and by documents in the possession of his family for some of the earlier portions..."
This book treats of the life and works of Victor Hugo, the great poet and writer.
The writings of Victor Hugo are so varied and multifarious, and many of them are so well known to English readers, that I have not deemed it necessary to subject them to a detailed analysis. At the same time, the reader unfamiliar with these powerful works will, I trust, be able to gather something of their purport and scope from the ensuing pages. As they have impressed all minds, moreover, by their striking originality, I thought that it would not be without its value if, while venturing to record my own impressions, I gave at the same time a representation of critical contemporary opinion upon them. Finally, it has been my object to present to the reader, within reasonable compass, a complete survey of the life and work of the most celebrated Frenchman of the nineteenth century.
This book deals with the story of Seneca who was one of the eminent Latin writers and philosophers of the Silver Age. Young, he was fascinated with the philosophical thoughts of the Stoics, to which sect he became devoted. He even adopted the austere modes of life they inculcated, and refused to eat the flesh of animals; but when the emperor, Tiberius, threatened to punish some Jews and Egyptians for abstaining from certain meats, at the suggestion of his father, he departed from this singularity.
Henri Bergson was born in the heart of Paris, the Montmartre quarter, in 1859. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his rich ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.
"The history of philosophy shows us chiefly the ceaselessly renewed efforts of reflection laboring to attenuate difficulties, to resolve contradictions, to measure with an increasing approximation a reality incommensurable with our thought. But from time to time bursts forth a soul which seems to triumph over these complications by force of simplicity, the soul of artist or of poet, keeping close to its origin, reconciling with a harmony felt by the heart terms perhaps irreconcilable by the intelligence. The language which it speaks, when it borrows the voice of philosophy, is not similarly understood by everybody. Some think it vague, and so it is in what it expresses. Others feel it precise, because they experience all it suggests. To many ears it brings only the echo of a vanished past, but others hear in it as in a prophetic dream the joyous song of the future. These words, which Bergson used in his eulogy of his teacher, Ravaisson, before the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, may be applied with greater appropriateness to Bergson himself."
It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself.
