The Word document posted here (above) is an excerpt from Chapter V of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in which there is an exchange of letters between Rev, Edward Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke. Mr. Casaubon has decided to propose to Dorothea.
Mr. Casaubon’s letter is a great example of over intellectualizing the emotions (such as I myself used to do sometimes in my youth; reading about the life of distant others can help one to better understand oneself), and of verbosity. So that would could be said plainly becomes encumbered in exposition.
Note how Dorothea does just the opposite in her response, saying what needs to be said in just three sentences.
Posted here (PDF above) is an article by James T. Farrell:
“Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and the Era He Lived In”
The New York Times Book Review
December 12, 1943
I have been an admirer of Farrell ever since I read Studs Lonigan. (I can thank my wife for calling my attention to it.) Farrell’s novel of boyhood recalls Twain and gave him insight into Huckleberry Finn.
There is an unforgettable passage in Chapter XXXI of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom wrestles with his scruples, his conscience. He knows he should do “the right thing” and turn Jim, the runaway slave, in, but he just can’t bring himself to do it:
“[I] got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now. …
As a writer, he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind: his mode of thinking and of expressing his thoughts is original. … His numbers, his pauses, his diction, are of his own growth, without transcription, without imitation. He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes in everything presented to its view whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast and attends to the minute. The reader of the “Seasons” wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses., … . His descriptions of extended scenes and general effects bring before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether pleasing or dreadful. The gaiety of Spring, the splendour of Summer, the tranquillity of Autumn, and the horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm that our thoughts expand with his imagery and kindle with his sentiments. … His diction is in the highest degree florid and luxuriant, such as may be said to be to his images and thoughts “both their lustre and their shade;” such as invests them with splendour. …
— Samuel Johnson, “Thomson,” The Lives of the Poets
I wrote the following note (scribbled hastily in a pub in Manhattan where I was reading Thomson’s The Seasons) to myself last week while immersed in Thomson’s “Spring”:
One might be inclined to say
when it comes to nature
the seasons
it’s all platitudes
Thomson shows this is not the case
His inspiring paean to spring and the seasons
is based upon minute observation and acutely felt experience
I myself have never forgotten the splendid fall in Massachusetts when I was fourteen years old, The warm sun, the crisp air, the colors, the foliage. It was nature at its most glorious. In a particular time and place.
Thomson’s poem (which provided the basis for the libretto of Haydn’s The Seasons) was based on minute, loving observation – rendered in beautiful verse.
I became acquainted with The Seasons because it was used as the libretto for Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. James Sambrook’s introduction is concise, lucid, and well worth reading.
Thirty years of taking-in; fifteen years of giving out; —that, in brief, is Oliver Goldsmith’s story. When, in 1758, his failure to pass at Surgeons’ Hall finally threw him on letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, and the fifteen years had been begun. What was to come he knew not; but, from his bare-walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified past. He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish “buckeen.” He had tried both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither. He had started for London and stopped at Dublin; he had set out for America and arrived at Cork. He had been many things :—a medical student, a strolling musician, a corrector of the press, an apothecary, an usher at a Peckham “academy.” Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his ” forty pounds a year” by farming a field or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting season from the “blue bed to the brown,” and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. As it was, if he could not be said “to have seen life steadily, and seen it whole,” he had, at all events, inspected it pretty narrowly in parts; and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things which, in his turn, he was to impress upon his writings. “No man “—says one of his biographers”*—ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.” To his last hour he was ·drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that “unhallowed time” when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities. To do as Goldsmith did, would scarcely enable a man to write a Vicar of Wakefield or a Deserted Village,—certainly his practice cannot be preached with safety “to those that eddy round and round.” But viewing his entire career, it is difficult not to see how one part seems to have been an indispensable preparation for the other, and to marvel once more (with the philosopher Square) at “the eternal Fitness of Things.”**
— Austin Dobson, Introduction, Poems and Plays By Oliver Goldsmith (Everyman’s Library, 1910)
*John Forster, author of The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith.
**A quotation from a fictional character, the philosopher Square, who is parodied in Fielding’s novel Tom Jones.
