Hugo, Victor : Victor Marie Vicomte Hugo (1802-85), French poet, dramatist & novelist, a towering figure in 19th-century French literature, who had great power to shape public opinion in France.
... 5, 38, 68, 112 Greece , 103 Gundari, 258 Gupta, Robi, 192 HAMLET, 72 Heruka, 268 Himalaya , 237, 281n. Hiranyagarbha, 143, 256 Hugo, Victor, 191 ILIAD, 22 India , 10-12, 24-5, 57, 112, 189, 254 Indra, 134, 138, 144,203,272 JALANDHRIPADA, 280 Janaka, 49, 51 Jayadeva ...
... Hibbert Journal, the, 251 Himalayas, the, 54, 100 Hinduism, 54, 110, 166 Hider. 70, 87-8, 106, 386 -Mein Kampf, 70 Homer, 136, 197,206,219 Hugo, Victor, 197,275 -A Villequier, 275n Huma m, 16, 129-30, 163, 166, 168 Huxley, T. H., 140, 192 Hellas, 219 IDA, 219 Impressionists, 145 India, 25 ...
... Ralph 367 Homer 53-55,265,267,319,320,370,381, 383,384,387,398,399,401 Hopkins, G.M. 75,98,314,368,455 Horu Thakur 45 Housman, A.H. 56 Hugo, Victor 377 Human Cycle, The 38,56,293,359,459 Huxley, Julian 37 Page 494 Ideal of Human Unity, The ...
... Scale if Perfection, 115 Himalayas, the, 151 Hinduism, 242, 276-8, 280 Hitler, 274 Hobbes, 108 Homer, 52, 73, 83, 85-6, 93, 147, 176 Horace, 89 Horatio, 173-5 Housman, 88 Hugo, Victor, 52 Huxley, Aldous, 114, 131-3, 144, 181 Index expurgawrius, 23 India, 53, 73, 105, 175, 199, 217-18, 222, 226, 228-9, 231, 235, 239, 244, 250, 253, 255, 257, 259-61, 267-9,274 ...
... Greatness and Sublimity How do you differentiate between epic power and the Aeschylean sublime? Into what category would the grandeur, at its best, of Marlowe and Victor Hugo fall? I don't know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the Légende des siècles tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole. Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would not call him epic. There... fellow has got nothing to say and says it with a consummately cloying melodiousness! Swinburne, as is well known, could never think of Victor Hugo without bursting into half a dozen alliterative superlatives, while Matthew Arnold it was, I believe, who pitied Hugo for imagining that poetry consisted in using "divinité", "infinité" "éternité", as lavishly as possible. And then there is Keats, whose... jostling opinions. I am not prepared to classify all the poets in the universe—it was the front bench or benches you asked for. By others I meant poets like Lucretius, Euripides, Calderon, Corneille, Hugo. Euripides ( Medea, Bacchae and other plays) is a greater poet than Racine whom you want to put in the first ranks. If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enter—only Vyasa and Sophocles ...
... Corneille above Racine, and Hugo above Corneille, but keeps even Hugo out of the sheer first class. In ranking Hugo as tops in French poetry but not tops enough in world-poetry, Sri Aurobindo is supported by one of the acutest minds of France herself, the Nobel-Prizeman Andre Gide. When Gide was asked by an interviewer, "Qui est le poete su-preme en Francais?", Gide said, "Victor Hugo, helas!" Page 46... its original form but in an imitation by the outer mind. Both the manifestations we find in the French poet Victor Hugo. Hugo had a remarkable capacity for powerful expression in Page 40 which the imagination could soar high without having sufficiently gone deep. Hugo did not properly fathom his subjects, he caught hold of some large surface-impressions and tried to carry them up... serious damage to his own quality be-cause he happened to be a poetic superman, a poetic avatar. Neither Hugo nor D'Annunzio was anything more than a big-size vibhuti in the poetic world. Hugo, I believe, was the bigger of the two and with a little more sense of Hugo being not so much of a Victor as his name suggested, he would have qualified for the company that Sri Aurobindo has noted as the sheer ...
... category of blank verse does this poem fall ? Has it any epic quality ? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power ? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante ? I should think epic poetry has a more natural Page 69 turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly... is one epic line— An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain. Perhaps the first three lines are near the epic—there may be one or two others I don't know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the 'Legende des Siècles' tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would not call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity ...
... fourth where poetry is in its very character vaster and wider and deeper – to be sure, Victor Hugo holds this touch of immensity. It is here that the poetic spirit has achieved a divine energising inspiration that wants to have a direct vision of the Truth and express it in words and rhythms in a noble manner. Victor Hugo may not have achieved, but he has touched the new bourne. Here the poet aims at infusing... BENGALI WRITINGS (In English Translation) ON ART AND LITERATURE World-Literature (I) ‘REAL poetry, the acme of poetical art,’ says Victor Hugo, ‘is characterised by immensity alone.’ That is why Aeschylus, Lucretius, Shakespeare and Corneille had conquered his heart. Had he been acquainted with Sanskrit literature he would have included... literature or of world-literature. Sub specie aeiernitatis – even a little of this saving factor saves us from a great peril. In the stark realism of a Balzac or in the winging romanticism of a Victor Hugo, or in the poised classicism of a Leconte de Lisle we get a glimpse of this very thing. That is why with all the defects we feel that the sleeping Brahman is, as it were, astir in them; that a cosmic ...
... so says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. A smile radiates the beauty of form. A deeper emotion makes tears more beautiful. Happiness is limned ¹"Attachez Dieu au gibet, vous avez la croix." – Victor Hugo Page 145 by the beauty of form, while sorrow is carved by the depth of the feeling. We appreciate a comedy through the play of a formal beauty and a tragedy through the poignancy ...
... Talks on Poetry TALK EIGHT We have said that Victor Hugo made history by using the word mouchoir (handkerchief) in a poetic drama. By the way, I myself made a bit of history last time by using not the word but the thing itself in an extraordinary context: absent-mindedly I wiped the blackboard with my mouchoir. I would have made still more history and... flawed poets, superb on one side, dreary or windbaggy on the other. And the reason why so much of the dreary remains in Wordsworth and so much of the windbaggy in Hugo is the same: a huge conceit that led them to overwrite themselves. Hugo was a more tempestuous person, hence his conceit is louder in accent. Wordsworth was a more reserved man, hence his conceit is quieter in tone. But there is in both... came all the easier because in fact many of their utterances are revelatory. Hugo was the less mystical of the two and, from our standpoint, his revelations are the less precious. But to be precious as spiritual effects does not imply from the poetic point of view the superiority of these effects to others. As poetry, Hugo's less mystical verses are of equal value as Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey lines ...
... ténébreux vont sous les lois immenses Que rien ne déconcerte et que rien n'attendrit, Vous ne pouvez avoir de subites clemencies Qui dérangent le monde, Ô Dleu, tranquille esprit!" – Victor Hugo Page 253 may recall here the famous Mahabharata story: it is the swayamvara of princess Damayanti. Damayanti is to choose (that is to say, find out) her hero Nala from among ...
... lines: Like winds or waters were her ways: They heed not immemorial cries; They move to their high destinies Beyond the little voice that prays. or to which Victor Hugo gives a very similar expression: Nos destins t é n é breux vont sous des lois immenses Que rien ne d é concerte et que rien n'attendrit. Vous ne pouvez avoir de subites... and dominion, ¹ Our dark destinies move under vast laws that nothing diverts, nothing softens. Thou canst not have sudden clemencies that disturb the world, 0 God, Spirit tranquil!-Victor Hugo, A Villequier. Page 275 although, in the higher status, all work together and harmoniously. Even then they do not possess a soul, a psychic core of being. They are forms ...
... altogether. He denies any truth to the dogmatic assertion that he is merely an ephemeral spark of consciousness bubbling for a while in the eternal ocean of death and non-existence. Did not Victor Hugo represent the undying hope of humanity when he declared at the close of his life: "I feel immortality in myself. I am rising, I know, towards the sky. The earth gives me its generous sap ...
... stupidly rigid principle! Can B really write nothing except what he has seen or experienced? What an unimaginative man he must be! And how dull his stories must be and how limited. I wonder whether Victor Hugo had to live in a convicts' prison before he invented Jean Valjean. Certainly one has to look at life, but there is no obligation to copy faithfully from life. The man of imagination carries a world ...
... literature: already in 1936 F. L. Lucas 1 could count 11,397 books, including his own. Once even some blood was about to be shed: on the night of November 25, 1830, the theatre at Paris where Victor Hugo's Romantic play Hernani was first shown became a roaring cockpit of combatant critics. But not always has much light been shed: possibly the heat of the discussion was too great to leave room... happened to be of a Page 1 familiar kind. The Classicists even frowned at familiar language. Was not Hugo almost mobbed for flinging the homely word "mouchoif " ("handkerchief") in the midst of his Hernani' s sentimental and sonorous alexandrines? According to Lucas, Hugo himself in his famous preface to that early play of his, Cromwell, associates Romanticism above all with... on the one side or the other, F.L. Lucas 2 dwells at some length on this difficulty. We need not go into it in detail. We may just illustrate an aspect of it which becomes relevant by our mention of Hugo and Hernani. Lucas quotes Lascelles Abercrombie as opposing Romanticism to Realism. By Realism· Abercrombie means not the literary creed of a Zola with its insistence on crude raw life but ...
... not quite sure. It appears that Mme David-Neel gave only one lecture at Paris' Theosophical Society, and that was in 1947. Page 301 to Belgium along with a great friend of his, Victor Hugo. Ever since she was a little girl of five in Paris, Alexandra David wanted to "go beyond the garden gate in search of the Unknown." She began that search around the age of twenty-three, when ...
... that generation Madhu Sudan's first great poems, Sharmishtha and Tilottama , had a complex effect much of a piece with the sensation created by Marlowe's Tamburlaine in Elizabethan England or Hugo's Hernani in nineteenth century France. They took men's imaginations by storm with their splendour, passion and mighty imagery; by creating the Bengali blank verse they freed poetry from the facilities... Sanscritists was over. That cabal of Pandits which had shouted against Madhu Sudan, could only murmur weakly against Bankim; the conscience of the nation had passed out of their keeping. But still the victor's audience was small and went little beyond the class that followed him into battle, the geniuses, the literary men, the women, the cultured zamindars and those men of the stamp of Rajah Jyotindra Mohan ...
... combination of epic and drama or like the odes of Meredith on the French Revolution. They give some clue to a possible epic form in the future. SRI AUROBINDO: There has been such an effort by Victor Hugo. His Legendes des siecles is an epic in conception, thought, tone and movement. It is the only epic in French. But as yet, I think, it has not been given its proper place. It does not deal with a ...
... interested in spiritism, such as the astronomer Camille Flammarion, the physiologist Charles Richet, the psychologist Jean Piaget and the chemist and physicist William Crookes (as were the writers Victor Hugo and Arthur Conan Doyle). A main point consisted in establishing the immortality of the soul and of reincarnation, no longer as articles of faith but experimentally. “Occultism”, stated the German ...
... he had caught a small pure flame which grander poets had missed: particularly the grand poet Victor Hugo who had spoken so much about "infinite" and "eternite" and "divinite" seemed to miss that flame because he had no access to the inner secrecy in whose ever-present Absence Mallarme breath-ed and moved. Hugo, besides being led away by his rhetorical tendency from the true mystic articulation, was still... still subject to the intellectualism inherent in the French language as developed through the centuries: Hugo at even his best had but sublimated by an imaginative and rhythmic process the spirit of prose. It is with men like Nerval and Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, that the French Muse began to emancipate herself from prose, and in Mallarme she exceeded herself by partly becoming non-French. Mallarme ...
... touch in them adds to the relish. Turning directly to France I I must speak up for one of the mightiest no less than finest creations in world literature, Les Miserables of Victor Hugo. A contemporary of Hugo's, equally famous as he, was Balzac who is the most prolific creator of living characters after Shakespeare. So intense is the life-force in his characters that someone has said that ...
... grateful happiness kindled by his superb art. In judging writers she distinguished between those who had an elemental creative force and those who were perfectionists in their art. She gave Victor Hugo as an example par excellence of the former category, saying, "Such people are not very careful, they may misspell or even make mistakes in grammar, but their rushing inspiration carries them ...
... All this as well as his later sex-transcendence without any loss of true passion demonstrates the subtle stuff of which he was made: he was no gross animal as so many great men -like Goethe and Victor Hugo - are in spite of their lofty intellects. But in one point Ellis fails in subtlety of spirit. The failure is associated with his having other women than his wife to minister to his emotional ...
... Buddhadev really write nothing except what he has seen or experienced? What an Page 111 unimaginative man he must be! And how dull his stories must be and how limited. I wonder whether Victor Hugo had to live in a convicts' prison before he created Jean Valjean. Certainly one has to look at life, but there is no obligation to copy faithfully from life. The man of imagination carries a world ...
... which stands to their credit if they had not been gifted with an almost supernatural spontaneity of perfect utterance, but otherwise facility is a dangerous delight. A powerful facility prevented Victor Hugo from seeing that often when he was thrilled by some profound emotion he did not take care to plumb it adequately but just took the surface suggestion and, led on by his mastery over language, ma... here and there a striking sentence like "La gloire est le soleil des morts", but that is all: he does not teem with unforgettable phrase or rhythm. It is true that his medium was different, but Victor Hugo too was a creator in prose, though not so intense in emanation of character as Balzac, and even in prose he had what Shakespeare had in poetry, though naturally there not to such a heart-disturbing... in his novels, therefore, approximate often to great poetry, while Balzac for all his giant capacity of dramatic fiction is not seldom the despair of both the artisf s and the grammarian's ear. What Hugo lacked here also was enough depth and sincerity — a lack which flawed his poetic vision just as want of word-music left Balzac's creative gusto incomplete. In the case of Gordon Bottomley, there is ...
... falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Similarly, Shelley' Revolt of Islam, Keats' s incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they too do not succeed much. Victor Hugo's La Legende des Siecles, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, and Thomas Hardy's Dynasts — all seem to have some element of epic, but they fail to achieve the largeness, the grandeur ...
... MOTHER Two Great Mysteries – the sky and the sea – have held an ageless attraction for the mortal mind and eye. From the shores of a small island Victor Hugo, in exile, kept looking at the sea all day long. How was he going to pass his days of exile? they asked him. I shall keep looking at the sea, he spoke in reply. ...
... Hindu dated 13 April 1993.) 4 While Romanticism was the stimulating culture of the French Revolution, French romantic poetry had its efflorescence much later, say with Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830). Almost three decades after, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (1857) "created a new shudder" in France, but also gave modern poetry the violent renovation it needed. His successors ...
... which, "the act of looking Page 373 back is really a glimpsing beyond the semi-darkness to see the approaching new dawn of equality, justice and freedom." 7 There is Victor Hugo's La legende des siecles, which is said to have the true epic movement and quality. There have been other, though less successful, attempts too during the last one hundred and fifty years; and ...
... "Night's tapers are burnt out and jocund day" etc. seems to give him a wonderful flash of the Unknown Country! He also alludes to the four magical lines of Keats about Ruth "amid the alien corn" and Victor Hugo's at least-for-once truly delicate, unrhetorical passage on the same theme in La légende des siècles. I wonder if you recollect the passage. Its last two stanzas are especially enchanting: ... that is Belloc's idea of the mystic, I can't put much value on his Roman Catholic mind! Shakespeare's line and Hugo's also are good poetry and may be very enchanting, as you say, but there is nothing in the least deep or mystic about them. Night's tapers are the usual poetic metaphor, Hugo's moissonneur and faucille d'or is an ingenious fancy—there is nothing true behind it, not the least shadow... regarded it as a graceful eulogy enhanced by the assumption of extreme humility (though only a courteous assumption) in the comparison between the poeta and the patronus . Virgil, Shakespeare, Hugo I think what Belloc meant in crediting Virgil with the power to give us a sense of the Unknown Country [ see page 373 ] was that Virgil specialises in a kind of wistful vision of things across great ...
... heard of Roman Virgil and the late-renaissance French poet Ronsard as well as the French-revolution poet Andre Chenier. As for Amrita himself, the forces in his past were Moses, Michelangelo and Victor Hugo, powerful personalities quite in contrast to his gentle, amiable present disposition. To help me in my historical researches I made sure from Amrita that the Egyptian princess mentioned in the ...
... they have – the sense of the "grandly real," the vivid and pulsating truth. What then is the thing that Sri Aurobindo has visualised, has endowed with a throbbing life and made a poignant reality? Victor Hugo said: Attachez Dieu au gibet, vous avez la croix – Tie God to the gibbet, you have the cross. Even so, infuse passion into a thing most prosaic, you create sublime poetry out of it. What is the ...
... what category of blank verse does this poem fall? Has it any epic quality? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante? I should think epic poetry has a more natural turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less... is one epic line— An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain. Perhaps the first three lines are near the epic—there may be one or two others. I don't know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the 'Legende des Siecles' tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would lot call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity ...
... English they would read: The Eternal Feminine Is leading us upward. Around this time I believe Goethe had also his last affaire du cceur, falling in love with a girl in her late teens. Victor Hugo at 80 was in full blast both as poet and novelist. In addition, he had eyes so good that he could recognise all his friends from the top of Notre Dame de Paris, had his entire set of teeth in such ...
... economical. The former do not always care to produce Page 43 perfect pieces while the latter are bent on perfection. As the highest examples of the two categories she mentioned Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert. Radhananda was multilingual and wrote English poems no less than French and Tamil ones. But a certain composition in English attributed to him in Champaklal's Treasures ...
... heard of Roman Virgil and the late-renaissance French poet Ronsard as well as the French-revolution poet Andre Chenier. As for Amrita himself, the forces in his past were Moses, Michelangelo and Victor Hugo, powerful personalities quite in contrast to his gentle, amiable present disposition. To help me in my historical researches I made sure from Amrita that the Egyptian princess mentioned in the Old ...
... Petite, moi qui suis l’immense?” La source dit au gouffre amer ; “Je te donne, sans bruit ni gloire, Ce qui te manque, o vaste mer! Une goutte d’eau qu’on peut boire.”* *03/03/195 Victor Hugo* 2. The Sleepy One *If he sleeps the child will see A very busy bumblebee Flit between is’land and sky Once her honey was laid by. If the child doth quietly rest An angel ...
... And everyone got nervous in front of the Mother. I have recited a lot of poems before the Mother: Les Elfes by Le Conte de Lisle, Liberté by Paul Eluard, Booz Endormi , La Conscience by Victor Hugo, the famous poem Ballade de Florentin Prunier by Georges Duhamel and other poems by reputed poets. Minnie-di once recited a poem most beautifully in her sweet voice. We were all enchanted. Tehmi-ben ...
... with a sense of ghostly vastitudes materialising and concentrating themselves for covert action within the narrow earth-limits. It is in such passages that Shakespeare is most true to Victor Hugo's similitude of him — a sea of sound: an elemental power not only wide and manifold, giving us humanity's universal nature, but also like the sea profound. Profound, again, in a double connotation: ...
... adventure—amusing, rather than solidly interesting. But it is all the history known to many people in France—just as many in England gather their history from Shakespeare's plays. 2 December 1934 Victor Hugo When I said to Pavitra that Les Misérables was one of the great works of art he replied "Faugh! What a shallow thing." But I believe I heard from Amrita that you used to regard it as one of the... certainly one of the great novels. It is certainly not philosophically or psychologically deep, but it is exceedingly vivid and powerful. 25 April 1937 People have different tastes—some regard Hugo as a childish writer, a rhetorician without depth—others regard him as a great poet and novelist. One has to form one's own judgment and leave others to hold theirs. 26 April 1937 I should like... are like that. There is another position that subtle psychology, deep and true presentation (not merely imaginative or idealistic) of the profounder problems or secrets of life and nature are needed. Hugo's characters and situations are thought by many to be melodramatic or superficial and untrue. His novels like his dramas are "romantic" and the present trend is against the romantic treatment of life ...
... two of the most relevant points should be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave Mahler who wrote: ‘We ...
... called "the father of Europe", In 1988 the French President proposed to transfer his mortal remains to the Pantheon, the monument where lay so many great men. Jean Monnet then would rest close to Victor Hugo, another visionary who one century earlier had prophesized, All of us here, we say to France, to England, to Prussia, to Austria, to Spain, to Italy, to Russia, we Page 53 say to... day will come when a cannon will be a museum piece, as instruments of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed! Let us measure the enormity of what Victor Hugo had dared say in 1871, just when France was reeling under the shock of a humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia, My revenge is my fraternity! No more frontiers! The Rhine for everyone! ...
... work, which is not a thing that can be done in public even if a poet's estimate of his achievement is as self-assured as that of Horace, Exegi monumentum aere perennius , or as magnificent as Victor Hugo's. Similarly, the reply was not meant for Mendonҫa himself and I do not think the whole can be shown to him without omissions or some editing, but if you wish and if you think that he will not resent ...
... – not to mention alchemy, mesmerism (i.e. hypnotism), the illuminati, and dark satanic sects … A glance at the literature of that time will meet with Honoré de Balzac (a disciple of Swedenborg), Victor Hugo, a practicing spiritist, Joris-Karl Huysmans and his novels about black magic, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and his idiosyncratic Sherlock Holmes, Marcel Proust, chronicler of his time, and ...
... that the form of the epic may be a combination of epic and drama, or may be a series of odes in combination like the one written by Meredith. Sri Aurobindo : There has been an effort by Victor Hugo. His La Légende des siècle is epic in tone, in thought and movement. And yet it is not given its right place by the critics. It does not deal with a story but with episodes. That is the only epic ...
... a revolution in artistic approach and technique, the writers and poets in their turn were revolutionizing literature. The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of Alexandre Dumas, of Victor Hugo and Flaubert; the second half was dominated by Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, Emile Zola, famed for his I accuse letter—to name but a few. They Page 21 ... Gurudev had called me!! At any rate, 'Mon-si-o Fouquet' was my first acquaintance with the French. But not so for Gurudev. He had visited France several times. He had also translated Moliere and Victor Hugo into Bengali. He not only knew famous men like Romain Rolland and Silvain Levy, but his family was very intimate with the Karpelés family. Rathindranath Tagore, the Poet's son, wrote about their... great fame. A fresh spirit was abroad. The very atmosphere was surcharged with a revolt against the old classical values —the legacy of the Renaissance and the Baroque. As a matter of fact, Hugo, Baudelaire, Zola had all leapt to the defence of Manet when he was attacked from all sides for his revolutionary painting. Baudelaire's critical work L'Art romantique (1868) is considered the fo ...
... to Nirvana. All the same, both ladies came to respect each other’s qualities and soon were friends. Alexandra David-Néel was born near Paris in 1868. Her father, Louis David, was a friend of Victor Hugo and he too, just like the great writer, had been banished for his anti-government stance. As a consequence Alexandra grew up in Brussels, educated by a bigoted mother and in sanctimonious nuns’ schools ...
... latter is a prince, a soldier & man of the world yielding by the way to the allurements of beauty, but not preoccupied with passion; the subtitle of the piece might be, in a more innocent sense than Victor Hugo's, "Le Roi s'amuse". He is the mirror of a courteous & self-possessed gentleman, full of mildness & grace, princely tact, savoir-faire, indulgent kindliness, yet energetic withal & quietly resolute ...
... which has little touch on the 'immensities' familiar and concrete to Asia. Indeed the very word 'immensity' makes the European intellect boggle and be on its guard - perhaps all the more because of Hugo's lavish sprinkling of it and of its likes over his poetry without sounding real depths, and because a number of cultist mystagogues have employed them cheaply. Here a reference to a correspondence between... at a total novel effect. You may open Paradise Lost anywhere to see what I mean: ...till then who knew The force of those dire arms? yet not for those Nor what the potent victor in his rage Can else inflict do I repent or change, Though changed in outward lustre; that fixt mind And high disdain, from sense of injured merit That with the mightiest raised... What a lot of cliches or easily found expressions Milton pours on us and yet achieves grandeur and force! Let me underline a few: 'dire arms', 'dire event', 'high disdain', 'high Supremacy', 'potent Victor', 'injured merit', 'fierce contention', 'deep despair', 'dreadful deeds', 'bold Compeer', 'sad overthrow', 'foul defeat', 'mighty Host', 'horrible destruction', 'laid low'. Insensitive to genres ...
... work, which is not a thing that can be done in public even if a poet's estimate of his achievement is as self-assured as that of Horace, Exegi monumentum aere perennius, or as magnificent as Victor Hugo's. Similarly, the reply was not meant for Mendonca himself and I do not think the whole can be shown to him without omissions or some editing; but if you wish and if you think that he will not resent ...
... belief in one's ideals and sincerity in the intelligence. These can exist very well behind a triple breastplate of satire and humour. Shaw's merits are surely ____________________ 1. After Victor Hugo, the famous nineteenth-century French writer. Page 240 greater than you seem disposed to admit in your letter. The tide is turning against him after being strongly for him— under ...
... prose and a new poetry." "...Madhusudan's first great poems Sharmistha and Tilottama had a complex effect, much of a piece with the sensation created by Marlowe's Tamburlaine in Elizabethan England or Hugo's Hernani in 19th century France. They took men's imagination by storm with their splendour, passion and mighty imagery; by creating the Bengali blank verse they freed poetry from the facilities and... which are all of battle and work and conquest and triumphant labour. Here, I say to myself, was a very soldier of Light, a warrior in God's world, a sculptor of men and institutions, a bold and rugged victor of the difficulties which matter presents to spirit. And the whole sums itself up to me in a powerful impression of spiritual practicality. The combination of these two words, usually so divorced from ...
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