Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg
Page 32
We of this age stand in the same relation to things as they, but with a sharpened curiosity. Religious freedom, freedom of thought, has prepared the way for heights of daring and speculation. Social freedom is still as far off as ever, but we dare dream of it.
WE NEVER EXCUSE THE ABSOLUTE WANT OF SPIRIT AND DIGNITY OF CHARACTER
We never excuse the absolute want of spirit and dignity of character, or a proper sense of what is due to oneself, in society and the common intercourse of life. This vice constitutes what we properly call meanness; when a man can submit to the basest slavery, in order to gain his ends; fawn upon those who abuse him, and degrade himself by intimacies and familiarities with undeserving inferiors. A certain degree of generous pride or self-value is so requisite that the absence of it in the mind displeases.
ON NOSES
It has often struck me as a fact of paramount significance in life that noise projectivity and ostentation, though always in themselves signs of uselessness and the superficial, are generally the echoes and heralds of the great, the useful and substantial. If we take religion as an instance, or a great cause like dandyism or women’s suffrage, is not the spouting, the shouting, the foppishness but the effervescence, the first dribblings of a solid and profound idea, of an earnest soul-enthralling basis? Nature has constructed each of us, rightly or wrongly, as an individual demonstration of this principle. The apparent important feature, the centre, the arresting portion of the face, the part that stands before all others in singleness of leadership, ostentatious and projecting, is the nose. Where-ever it leads the face, the entire body must follow after it. There is no protesting, no argufying, we must endure. The eyes may close in chagrin, mortification, the mouth may howl in disgust, the ears twitch in agony, but still we must endure. Yet what is this apparent leadership? It is only a station it has appropriated to secure a position, a prominence which otherwise it had not got, and it only heralds the will.
JOY
And when we had seen Time die, and passed through the porches of silence, we came to a land where joy spread its boughs, and we knew that the dreams we had dreamed before Time were but the shadows of the tree of joy mirrored in the waters of life. For the roots of joy lie beyond the valleys and hills of life, and the branches thereof blossom where weeping earth mists come not near, and only the sounds of the laughing of ripples, the running of happy streams, and the rapturous singing of birds is heard. Where delight lies coolly shadowed, overburdened by the weariness of joy, lulled by the songs of joy. Joy — joy the birds sing, joy — the rivers, joy — the happy leaves, for the fear of Time haunts not, and the hands of fate are afar.
SHORT FRAGMENTS
I
An artist who depends on his art for his living must be an advertiser.
II
Youth is still childhood. When we cast off every cloudy vesture and our thoughts are clear and mature; when every act is a conscious thought, every thought an attempt to arrest feelings; our feelings strong and overwhelming, our sensitiveness awakened by insignificant things in life... When the skies race tumultuously with our blood and the earth shines and laughs, when our blood hangs suspended at the rustling of a dress... Our vanity loves to subdue — battle, aggressive... How we despise those older and duller — we want life, newness, excitement.
III
Poor people are born in troubles and spend all their lives trying to get out of them. But, born free, all try to get into them.
IV
Very few people say what they mean, though they may say what they think. Few can shape their feelings into words, and in the hurry of conversation say the first words that come. Few people’s actions are expressions even of their nature — we are different with different persons.
V
‘Crossing the Bar’ has this consistency, this perfect oneness of tone. A sense of unutterable life in quiet, a depth of yearning, the fading greyness of the whole piece...
VI
Art to be great must be unforgettable. Leaving the picture or poem, the impression remains, the quintessence, epitome. Suggestiveness, mystery, vagueness, something underlying what is actually put down, a hauntingness of...
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
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Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
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br /> Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Ancient Classics
Aeschylus
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Bede
Cassius Dio
Catullus
Cicero
Demosthenes
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laërtius
Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Josephus
Julius Caesar
Juvenal
Livy
Longus
Lucan
Lucretius
Marcus Aurelius
Martial
Nonnus
Ovid
Pausanias
Petronius
Pindar
Plato
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Younger
Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Propertius
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Sallust
Sappho
Seneca the Younger
Sophocles
Statius
Suetonius
Tacitus
Terence
Theocritus
Thucydides
Tibullus
Virgil
Xenophon
Delphi Poets Series
A. E. Housman
Alexander Pope
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Andrew Marvell
Beowulf
Charlotte Smith
Christina Rossetti
D. H Lawrence (poetry)
Dante Alighieri (English)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delphi Poetry Anthology
Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)
Edmund Spenser
Edward Lear
Edward Thomas
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
Ezra Pound
Friedrich Schiller (English)
George Herbert
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Isaac Rosenberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
John Clare
John Donne
John Dryden
John Keats
John Milton
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Lord Byron
Ludovico Ariosto
Luís de Camões
Matthew Arnold
Michael Drayton
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Browning
Robert Burns
Robert Frost
Robert Southey
Rumi
Rupert Brooke
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Gray
Thomas Hardy (poetry)
Thomas Hood
T. S. Eliot
W. B. Yeats
Walt Whitman
Wilfred Owen
William Blake
William Cowper
William Wordsworth
Masters of Art
Caravaggio
Claude Monet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Diego Velázquez
Eugène Delacroix
Gustav Klimt
J. M. W. Turner
Johannes Vermeer
John Constable
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Paul Cézanne
Paul Klee
Peter Paul Rubens
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Sandro Botticelli
Raphael
Rembrandt van Rijn
Titian
Vincent van Gogh
Wassily Kandinsky
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Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Nord-Pas-de-Calais — Rosenberg’s final resting place
Rosenberg’s grave