Scientific Influences in the Work of Emile Zola and George Eliot

Front Cover
University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1921 - Comparative literature - 336 pages

From inside the book

Selected pages

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 143 - We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.
Page 128 - Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement...
Page 125 - There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone : you can't isolate your-self, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe : evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
Page 147 - Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly seems a reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of selfconquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.
Page 159 - Poor Rosamond's vagrant fancy had come back terribly scourged, — meek enough to nestle under the old despised shelter. And the shelter was still there: Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully.
Page 128 - One begins to suspect at length that there is no direct correlation between eyelashes and morals; or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of the fair one's grandmother, which is on the whole less important to us.
Page 151 - I wonder," he went on, still looking at her, "whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measuring the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful — who made a man's passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life.
Page 133 - I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness ; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie...
Page 148 - ... some tragic' mark of kinship in the one brief life to the farstretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny.
Page 136 - ... out of her school-life with a soul untrained for inevitable struggles — with no other part of her inherited share in the hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of men, than shreds and patches of feeble literature and false history...

Bibliographic information