Food for Thought
1. What can you say about the effect produced by alliteration in the initial lines?
2. What is the symbolic meaning of the word olive?
3. What thematic set comes into being in the first paragraph?
4. Speak about the anaphorical beginning of the first and the third paragraphs.
5. Why is the word Spain reiterated in the text?
6. How do you understand the expression to enter the earth honorably?
Topics for discussion
1. Speak about the Civil War in the USA (1861-65) and in Spain (1936-39).
2. Divide the text into two thematic parts and compare them.
3. Discuss the motif of Resurrection.
WALTER SCOTT.
Kenilworth.
Chapter 16
The eventful hour, thus anxiously prepared for on all sides, at length approached, and, each followed by his long and glittering train of friends and followers, the rival Earls entered the Palace-yard of Greenwich at noon precisely.
As if by previous arrangement, or perhaps by intimation that such was the Queen's pleasure, Sussex and his retinue came to the Palace from Deptford by water, while Leicester arrived by land; and thus they entered the court-yard from opposite sides. This trifling circumstance gave Leicester a certain ascendancy in the opinion of the vulgar, the appearance of his cavalcade of mounted followers showing more numerous and more imposing than those of Sussex's party, who were necessarily upon foot. No show or sign of greeting passed between the Earls, though each looked full at the other, both expecting perhaps an exchange of courtesies, which neither was willing to commence. Almost in the minute of their arrival the castle bell tolled, the gates of the Palace were opened, and the Earls entered, each numerously attended by such gentlemen of their train whose rank gave them that privilege. The yeomen and inferior attendants remained in the court-yard, where the opposite parties eyed each other with looks of eager hatred and scorn, as if waiting with impatience for some cause of tumult, or some apology for mutual aggression. But they were restrained by the strict commands of their leaders, and overawed, perhaps, by the presence of an armed guard of unusual strength.
In the meanwhile, the more distinguished persons of each train followed their patrons into the lofty halls and antechambers of the royal Palace, flowing on in the same current, like two streams which are compelled into the same channel, yet shun to mix their waters. The parties arranged themselves, as if it were instinctively, on the different sides of the lofty apartment, and seemed eager to escape from the transient union which the narrowness of the crowded entrance had for an instance compelled them to submit to. The folding doors at the upper end of the long gallery were immediately afterwards opened, and it was announced in a whisper that the Queen was in her presence-chamber, to which these gave access. Both Earls moved slowly and stately towards the entrance; Sussex followed by Tressilian, Blount, and Raleigh, and Leicester by Varney. The pride of Leicester was obliged to give way to court forms, and with a grave and formal inclination of the head, he paused until his rival, a peer of older creation than his own, passed before him. Sussex returned the reverence with the same formal civility, and entered the presence-room. Tressilian and Blount offered to follow him, but were not permitted, the Usher of the Black Rod alleging in excuse that he had precise orders to look to all admissions that day. To Raleigh, who stood back on the repulse of his companions, he said, "You, Sir, may enter," and he entered accordingly.
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"Follow me close, Varney," said the Earl of Leicester, who had stood aloof for a moment to mark the reception of Sussex; and, advancing to the entrance, he was about to pass on, when Varney, who was close behind him, dressed out in the utmost bravery of the day, was stopped by the usher, as Tressilian and Blount had been before him. "How is this, Master Bowyer?" said the Earl of Leicester. "Know you who I am, and that this is my friend and follower?"
"Your Lordship will pardon me," replied Bowyer, stoutly; "my orders are precise, and limit me to a strict discharge of my duty."
"Thou art a partial knave," said Leicester, the blood mounting to his face, "to do me this dishonour, when you but now admitted a follower of my Lord of Sussex."
"My lord," said Bowyer, "Master Raleigh is newly admitted a sworn servant of her Grace, and to him my orders did not apply."
"Thou art a knave an ungrateful knave," said Leicester; "but he that hath done, can undo thou shalt not prank thee in thy authority long!"
This threat he uttered aloud, with less than his usual policy and discretion, and having done so, he entered the presence-chamber, and made his reverence to the Queen, who, attired with even more than her usual splendour, and surrounded by those nobles and statesmen whose courage and wisdom have rendered her reign immortal, stood ready to receive the homage of her subjects. She graciously returned the obeisance of the favourite Earl, and looked alternately at him and at Sussex, as if about to speak, when Bowyer, a man whose spirit could not brook the insult he had so openly received from Leicester, in the discharge of his office, advanced with his black rod in his hand, and knelt down before her.
"Why, how now, Bowyer," said Elizabeth, "thy courtesy seems strangely timed!"
"My Liege Sovereign," he said, while every courtier around trembled at his audacity, "I come but to ask whether, in the discharge of mine office, I am to obey your Highness' commands, or those of the Earl of Leicester, who has publicly menaced me with his displeasure, and treated me with disparaging terms, because I denied entry to one of his followers, in obedience to your Grace's precise orders?"
The spirit of Henry VIII was instantly aroused in the bosom of his daughter, and she turned on Leicester with a seerity which appaled him, as well as all his followers.
"God's death! my lord," such was her emphatic phrase, "what means this? We have thought well of you, and brought you near to our person; but it was not that you might hide the sun from our faithful subjects. Who gave you license to contradict our orders, or control our officers? I will have in this court, ay, and in this realm, but one mistress, and no master."
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Notes.
The plot of the novel centres round the royal court of Elisabeth I, the rivalry between the Earls and the Queen's relations with the Earl of Leicester. In the previous chapter Walter Scott comments on the Queen's way of ruling: "Elisabeth, like many of her sex, was fond of governing by factions, so as to balance two opposing interests, and reserve in her own hand the power of making either predominant, as the interest of state, or perhaps as her own female caprice The two nobles who at present stood as rivals in her favour, possessed very different pretentions to share it; yet it might be in general said, that the Earl of Sussex had been most serviceble to the Queen, while Leicester was most dear to the woman" (W. Scott, Kenilworth, Tauchnitz ed., Leipzig 1845, pp. 163-164)
yeomen here: men serving in a royal or noble household
Raleigh Sir Walter Raleigh (15521618), a courtier, traveller, poet and writer
peer a nobleman of the rank of baron and upward
Food for thought.
1. Speak on the opening paragragh. What does the reader learn from it? What do we call such type of the beginning? Comment on the choice of epithets.
2. Divide the text into parts. Define the subject matter and the idea of each part. Pick out key-phrases or sentences to prove your idea.
3. Find synonymic expressions in the text, analyse their function
4. State the ways the rivalry of the earls is underlined in the passage. What stylistic devices are used?
5. Analyse the implications of the simile ("like two streams").
6. Comment on the function of architectural detail and the precise description of the court ceremony in the style of Walter Scott.
7. Study the dialogue carefully. Analyse the syntactical structure of the sentences and the usage of archaic words and obsolete forms. Do you think it would have been possible to read and understand the real idiom of the 16th centurys language?
8. Learn what imitation style is. Say whether it prevails in the narration or in the dialogue.
9. What other means together with the imitation style in the dialogue is used to create the atmosphere of the past?
10. Make a list of expressions used as forms of address at the court.
11. Comment on the ways the historical persons (the Earl of Leicester, the Queen) are portrayed. What essential features of character of a nobleman and a sovereign are given in the text?
12. Pick out the various social ranks mentioned in the text. Account for Scotts interest in them.
13. Analyse the syntactical pattern of the text.
14. Give a summary of the text analysis.
Topics for oral discussion.
1. Some critics call Walter Scott a learned antiquary. Can you prove this statement?
2. Define the essence of the political struggle of the period as shown in the text.
3. Comment on Walter Scotts artistic method as used in the portrayal of the Queen and the Earls. State his attitude to them.
4. Collect and classify the archaic elements in the text. Where are they more numerous?
Show all the different means used to emphasize the splendour of the court.
CHARLES DICKENS.
Bleak House.
In Chancery.
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Ha1l. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as fullgrown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of i11-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (If this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
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Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, foq on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships: fog drooping on the gunwales of barqes and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Cnance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time - as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leadenheaded old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here - as here he is - with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be - as here they are - mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ouqht to be - as are they not? - ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well, may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well, may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well, may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its' owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might, the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"
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Notes.
Michaelmas Term the autumn term, Michaelmas (the festival of St. Michael) being celebrated on September 29.
Lincoln Inn one of the four Inns of the Court buildings belonging to four legal societies having exclusive right of admitting persons to practice a the Bar. The Inns of the Court were formerly the residence of law students.
Holborn Hill a street in London.
Temple Bar (Gateway) a gate that marked the westward boundary of the City (now replaced by a monument).
The passage near the registrars table is metaphorically called the well. Having it in mind the writer alludes to a myth according to which Truth was to be found at the bottom of a well.
Food for thought.
1. Analyse the syntactical structure of the first paragraph. What impression is created through syntax? Are there any phonetic stylistic devices to support the image? What is the stylistic function of the allusion to the Bible? To natural history?
2. What is the principle of foregrounding of the second paragraph? What stylistic devices are used to create the image? Name the reason of mentioning certain groups of people in the text.
3. Account for the usage of the same images for the description of the natural phenomenon and the situation in the Court. Find the instances of repetition and explain their function. Speak on the usage of superlatives.
4. By what means is the Court of Chancery described? What is the order of presentation? What is the function of anaphoric repetition On such an afternoon which is the allusion to the love scene in Shakespeares Merchant of Venice? Account for the list of intricate law terms used by the author. What is the function to the myth about the well? Analyse the convergence of stylistic devices.
5. Find the logical completion of the sentence Well may the court be dim. What device focuses the readers attention on the main issue by keeping him in suspense?
6. Analyse the syntactical pattern of the last sentence and its subject matter. Find the allusion to Dante; define its function.
Topics for oral discussion.
1. Comment on the title of the book and the chapter. Explain the function of the prologue as a strong position.
2. Analyse the sources of Dickens imagery.
3. Prove that Dickens descriptions are never objective but always emotional.
4. Account for the role of symbols in the text.
5. Account for the sources and role of allusions in the text.
6. Analyse the usage of phonetic stylistic devices in the passage.
7. Speak on the syntactical pattern of the paragraphs and its role.
8. Irony in the text.
CHARLES DICKENS.
Dombey and Son
Chapter I.
Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.
Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome, well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effects, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good time - remorseless twins they are for striding through their human forests, notching as they go - while the countenance of Son was crossed and recrossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.
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Dombey, exulting in the long-looked-for event, jingled and jingled the heavy gold watch-chain that depended from below his trim blue coat, whereof the buttons sparkled phosphorescently in the feeble rays of the distant-fire. Son, with his little fists curled up and clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be squaring at existence for having come upon him so unexpectedly. "The house will once again, Mrs. Dombey". said Mr. Dombey, "be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son; Dom-bey and Son!"
The words had such a softening influence, that he appended a term of endearement to Mrs. Dombey's name (though not without some hesitation, as being a man but little used to that form of address) and said: "Mrs. Dombey, my my dear!"
A transient flush of faint surprise overspread the sick lady's face as she raised her eyes towards him.
"He will be christened Paul, my - Mrs.Dombey - of course". She feebly echoed: "Of course", or rather expressed it by the motion of her lips, and closed her eyes again.
"His father's name, Mrs. Dombey, and his grandfather's. I wish his grandfather were alive this day". And again he said "Dombey and Son" in exactly the same tone as before.
Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A.D. had now anno Dombey - and Son.
Food for thought.
1. Divide the text into logical parts, state their subject matters and ideas, say whether they present a narration, a description, a dialogue, etc.
2. What is the prevailing mood in the first paragraph? What helps you to define it? Account for the usage of a simile in the paragraph and the associations it creates.
3. What is the stylistic function of the reiteration in the description of Mr. Dombey and his sons appearance?
4. Analyse the structure of the convergence of the stylistic devices describing Mr. Dombey and his son. Pay your attention to the usage of capital letters.
5. Define the reason of Mr. Dombeys exultation; support your idea by the text.
6. Comment on the relations between Mr. and Mrs. Dombey.
7. What is the function of the hyperbole in the last paragraph? How does the allusion to anno Dominicontribute to the depiction of Mr. Dombeys character?
Topics for oral discussion.
1. Comment on the strong positions of the text. What will the plot of the book be centred around, judging by chapter1?
2. Comment on different types of repetition in the text.
3. Speak on Mr. Dombey as a typical bourgeois. What is the authors attitude to him?
THOMAS HARDY.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
Chapter XX.
The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.
Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all position in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the conveniences begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.
Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been translated to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love: where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whether does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet-a rosy warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh and interesting specimen of womankind.
They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually fell to lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the alarm as the others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, that she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door: then up the ladder to Angel's calling him a loud whisper; then woke her fellow milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and the dairymen usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour latter.
The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.
Food for thought.
1. Divide the text into logically connected parts; find the key-sentences; speak on the subject matter and the idea of each.
2. Find the introduction to the text; analyse the convergence of stylistic devices and define the symbolic value of the image.
3. Comment on the social position of dairyman Cricks household. Why does the author consider it the happiest one?
4. Find the devices likening Tess to nature, reason their usage. Speak on Tess feelings.
5. Speak on the way Angel Clare is presented in the text. What is the authors attitude to him? How does his name reveal his character? Analyse the choice of words in the paragraph describing Angels attitude to Tess.
6. Account for the daily routine on the farm and its significance to Thomas Hardy.
7. Comment on the closing sentence and its philosophic meaning.
8. Give a summary of analysis of the text.
Topics for oral discussion.
1. Find the echo of the authors philosophy that of pessimistic fatalism in the passage under study.
2. Comment on the role of nature in Hardys descriptions.
3. Compare the ways the main characters are described.
4. Country life and the authors attitude to it.
5. Speak on the opening and closing paragraphs.
OSCAR WILDE.
The picture of Dorian Gray
Chapter 10
He sighed, and, having poured himself out some tea, opened Lord Henry's note. It was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper, and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at eight-fifteen. He opened The St. James's languidly, and looked through it. A red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye. It drew attention to the following paragraph:
"INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS. - An inquest was held this morning at the Bell Tavern, Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the body of Sibyl Vane, a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre, Holborn. A verdict of death by misadventure was returned. Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of Dr. Birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased".
He frowned, and, tearing the paper in two, went across the room and flung the pieces away. How ugly it all was! And how horribly real ugliness made things! He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for having sent him the report. And it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil. Victor might have read it. The man knew more than enough English for that.
Perhaps he had read it, and had begun to suspect something. And, yet, what did it matter? What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's death? There was nothing to fear. Dorian Gray had not killed her.
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little pearl-coloured octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an armchair, and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full 6f argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spirital ecstases of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from the chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.
Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed through the windows. He read on by its wan light till he could read no more. Then after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and, going into the next room, placed the book on the little Florentine table, that always stood at his bedside and began to dress for dinner.
It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found Lord Henry sitting alone in the morning-room, looking very much bored.
"lm so sorry, Harry", he cried, but really it is entirely your fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was going."
"Yes: I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair.
"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference."
"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry. And they passed into the diningroom.
(O.Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958)
Notes
The St. James's - a London newspaper
Victor - Dorian Gray's valet
argot (French) - here: Parisian slang
Sybolistes (French) representatives of a literary trend in the last decades of the 19th century.
The French novel mentioned in the extract is most likely the work of the French decadent writer J. -K. Huysmans called A rebours (1884)
Food for thought.
1. 1.Divide the text according to the subject matters and ideas of the parts.
2. Define the general mood of the first paragraph and speak on the changes in the emotional state of the character throughout the text. What stylistic devices helped you?
3. What can you say about the style of the article? Can a term crude journalese be applied to it? Prove you viewpoint by the examples. Compare the style of the article with that of the yellow book. What is the stylistic function of the contrast?
4. What thematic fields can we find in the description of the yellow book? Speak in this connection on the problems decadent writers were interested in.
5. Find contrasting images in the description of the yellow book. What stylistic devices create them? What is their function? Analyse the implications of as monstrous as orchids.
6. Speak how the syntactical pattern contributes to the idea.
7. Prove the fact that Dorian Gray likes to surround himself with beautiful things.
8. Define the stylistic devices to describe the evening. What is the stylistic function of the description?
9. Find a paradox in the text, analyse the means to create it and its function.
10. What can you say about Lord Henrys influence on Dorian Gray?
11. Pick out the facts about aristocracys daily routine. What is the authors attitude to it?
Topics for oral discussion.
1. Give a summary of analysis of the text. Comment on the authors creed and the way it is revealed in the passage.
2. Analyse the strong positions of the text, reveal the mood prevailing in the opening and closing passages.
3. Comment on the types of contrast presented in the text.
4. Study the ways the idea of Art for Arts sake is introduced in the passage.
5. What can you say about O. Wildes individual style?
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers.
On the Easter Monday the same party took an excursion to Wingfield Manor. It was great excitement to Miriam to catch a train at Sethley Bridge, amid all the bustle of the Bank Holiday crowd. They left the train at Alfreton. Paul was interested in the street and in the colliers with their dogs. Here was a new race of miners. Miriam did not live till they came to the church. They were all rather timid of entering, with their bags of food, for fear of being turned out. Leonard, a comic, thin fellow, went first. Paul, who would have died rather than be sent back, went last. The place was decorated for Easter. In front the hundreds of white narcissi seemed to be growing. The air was dim and coloured from the windows, and thrilled with subtle scent of lilies and narcissi. In that atmosphere Miriam's soul came into a glow. Paul was afraid of the things he mustn't do and he was sensitive to the feel of the place. Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together. He would not go beyond the Communion - rail. She loved him for that. Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mystecism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her.
Miriam very rarely talked to the other lads. They at once became awkward in conversation. So usually she was silent.
It was midday when they climbed the steep path to the manor. All things shone softly in the sun, which was wonderfully warm and enlivening. Celindines and violets were out. Everybody was tip-top full with happiness. The glitter of the ivy, the soft atmospheric grey of the castle walls, the gentleness of everything near the ruin, was perfect.
The manor is of hard, pale grey stone, and the outer walls are black and calm. The young folk were in raptures. They went in trepidation, almost afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them. In the first courtyard, within the broken walls, were farm-carts, with their shafts lying idle on the ground, the tyres of the wheels brilliant with gold-red rust. It was very still.
All eagerly paid their sixpence, and went timidly through the fine clean arch of the inner courtyard. They were shy. Here on the pavement, where the halls had been, an old thorn-tree was budding. All kinds of strange openings and broken rooms were in the shadow around them.
After lunch they set off once more to explore the ruins. This time the girl went with the boys, who could act guides and expositors. There was one tall tower in a corner, rather tottering where they say Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned.
Think of the Queen going up there, said Mary in a low voice, as she climbed the hollow stairs.
If she could get there, said Paul, for she had rheumatism like anything. I reckon they treated her rottenly.
You don't think she deserved it? asked Miriam.
No, I don't. She was only lively.
They continued to mount the winding staircase. A high wind, blowing through the loopholes went rushing up the shaft, and filled the girl's skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until he took the hem of her dress and held it down for her. He did it perfectly simply, as he would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always.
Round the broken top of the tower the ivy bushed out, old and handsome. Also, there were a few chill gillivers, in pale cold bud. Miriam wanted to lean over for some ivy, but he would not let her. Instead, she had to wait behind him, and take from him each spray as he gathered it and held it to her, each one separately, in the purest manner of chivalry. The tower seemed to rock in the wind. They looked over miles and miles of wooded country, and country with gleams of pasture.
The crypt underneath the manor was beautiful, and in perfect preservation. Paul made a drawing: Miriam stayed with him. She was thinking of Mary Queen of Scots looking with her strained, hopeless eyes, that could not understand misery, over the hills whence no help came, or sitting in this crypt, being told of a God as cold as the place she sat in.
They set off again gaily, looking round on their beloved manor that stood so clean and big on its hill.
"Supposing you could have that farm", said Paul to Miriam.
"Yes",
"Wouldn't it be lovely to come and see you!"
They were now in the bare country of stone walls, which he loved, and which, though only ten miles from home, seemed so foreign to Miriam. The party was straggling. As they were crossing a large meadow that spoled away from the sun, along a path embedded with innumerable tiny glittering points, Paul, walking alongside, laced his fingers in the strings of the bag Miriam was carring, and instantly she felt Annie behind, watching and jealous. But the meadow was bathed in a glory of sunshine, and the path was jewelled, and it was seldom that he gave her any sign. She held her fingers very still among the strings of the bag, his fingers touching and the place was golden as a vision.
Notes.
Anne is Paul's elder sister, Leonard is her friend.
Food for thought.
1. Divide the text into parts; state the connections between the parts.
2. Analyse the opening paragraph, state its function. What is the mood presented in the first paragraph? Comment on the feelings of Paul and Miriam; define the stylistic devices the author used.
3. Pick out the words and word-combinations belonging to the thematic field of ecstasy and intense feelings. Do you find any similarity in the description of the church and the ruin? Account for it.
4. Speak on Paul and Miriams feelings in the church and the way the are presented.
5. What is the stylistic function of mentioning Mary Queen of Scots? How does the mood change in the following description? State Pauls attitude to the queen. Does it differ from Miriams? Prove that Miriam is a romantic girl.
6. Comment on the closure of the text; find the key words that create the atmosphere.
Topics for oral discussion.
1. Analyse the implications suggested by the title.
2. Comment on the opening and closing paragraphs.
3. Speak on the difference in presentation of religious places and on the rloe of religion for Miriam.
4. Dwell upon similarities and difference between Miriam and Paul.
5. Build as many thematic sets of the text as possible; account for their place in the text.
6. How is Lawrences esthetic creed expressed in the given passage?
JOHN GALSWORTHY.
The man of property.
Part III.
Chapter VI.
At ten o'clock Soames left; twice in reply to questions, he had said that Irene was not well; he felt he could no longer trust himself. His mother kissed him with her large soft kiss, and he pressed her hand, a flush of warmth in his cheeks. He walked away in the cold wind, which whistled desolately round the corners of the streets under a sky of clear steel-blue, alive with stars; he noticed neither their frosty greeting, nor the night-women hurrying in their shabby furs, nor the pinched faces of vagabonds at street corners. Winter has come. But Soames hastened home, oblivious; his hands trembled as he took the late letters from the gilt wire cage into which they had been thrust through the slit in the door.
None from Irene.
He went into the dining-room; the fire was bright there, his chair drawn up to it, slippers ready, spirit case, and carven cigarette box on the table; but after staring at it all for a minute or two he turned out the light and went upstairs. There was a fire too in his dressing-room, but her room was dark and cold. It was into this room that Soames went.
He made a great illumination with candles, and for a long time continued pacing up and down between the bed and the door. He could not get used to the thought that she had really left him, and as though still searching for some message, some reason, some reading of all the mystery of his married life, he began opening every recess and drawer.
There were her dresses; he had always liked, indeed insisted, that she should be well-dressed - she had taken very few; two or three at most, and drawer after drawer, full of linen and silk things, was untouched.
Perhaps after all it was only a freak, and she had gone to the seaside for a few days' change. If only that were so, and she were really coming back, he would never again do as he had done that fatal night before last, never again run that risk - though it was her duty, her duty as a wife, though she did belong to him - he would never again run that risk; she was evidently not quite right in her head!
He stopped over the drawer where she kept her jewels; it was not locked, and came open as he pulled, the jewel box had the key in it. This surprised him untill he remembered that it was sure to be empty. He opened it.
It was far from empty. Divided, in little green velvet compartments, were all the things he had given to her, even her watch, and stuck into the recess that contained the watch was a three cornered note addressed "Soames Forsyte", in Irene's handwriting.
"I think I have taken nothing that you or your people have given me". And that was all.
He looked at the clasps and bracelets of diamonds and pearls, at the little flat gold watch with a great diamond set in sapphires, at the chains and rings, each in its nest, and the tears rushed up in his eyes and dropped upon them. Nothing that she could have done, nothing that she had done, brought home to him like this the inner significance of her act. For the moment, perhaps, he understood nearly all there was to understand - understood that she loathed him, that she had loathed him for yars, that for all intents and purposes they were like people living in different worlds, that there was no hope for him, never had been, even, that she had suffered - that she was to be pitied.
In that moment of emotion he betrayed the Forsyte in him forgot himself, his interests, his property - was capable of almost anything; was lifted into the pure ether of the selfless and unpractical.
Such moments pass quickly.
And as though with the tears he had purged himself of weakness, he got up, locked the box, and slowly, almost trembling, carried it with him into the other room.
Notes
Irene had been Soames wife for three years.
Food for thought:
1. Speak about Soames condition in the initial lines.
2. What can you say about the weather described in the first paragraph?
3. What is the stylistic function of contrastive images in the second paragraph?
4. Comment on the expression the mystery of his married life.
5. Speak about the reported speech. How does it characterize Soames feelings?
6. What do you think about Irenes note?
7. Comment on the reiteration of the verb loathe in parallel constructions.
8. Speak about the motif of purging in the closure of the text.
Topics for Discussion
1. Analyse the strong positions of the text.
2. Comment on the analogy.
3. Reported Speech as the method of characterization.
4. The portrayal of Irene.
5. Speak about the main features of Galsworthys style.
RICHARD ALDINGTON.
Death of a Hero.
Part I. 4.
But more than words about things were things themselves. You looked and looked at them, and then you wanted to put down what they looked like, rearrange them in patterns. In the drawing-class they made you look at a dirty whitish cube, cylinder and cone, and you drew and re-drew hard outlines which weren't there. But for yourself you wanted to get the colours of things and how they faded into each other and how they formed themselves - or did you form them? - into exciting patterns. It was so much more fun to paint things than ever to read what Keats and Shakespeare thought about them. George spent all his pocket-money on paints and drawing-pencils and sketch-bocks and oil-sketching paper and water-colour blocks. For a long time he hadn't much to look at, even in reproductions. He had Cruikshank and Quiz illustrations which he didn't much care for; and a reproduction of a Bouguereau which he hated; and two Rossetti pictures which he rather liked; and a catalogue of the Tate Collection which gave him photographs of a great many horrible Watts and Frank Dicksees. Best of all, he liked an album of coloured reproductions of Turner's water-colours. Then, one spring, George Augustus took him to Paris for a few days. They did an "educative" visit to Louvre, and George simply leaped at the Italians and became very Pre-Raphaelite and adored the Primitives. He was quite feverish for week after he got back unable to talk of anything else. Isabel was worried about him: it was so unboyish, so well, really, quite unhealthy, all this silly craze for pictures, and spending hours and hours crouching over paint-blocks, instead of beinq in the fresh air. So much nicer for the boy to be manly. Wasn't he old enough to have a gun licence and learn to kill things?
So George had a gun licence, and went out shooting every morning in the autumn. He killed several plovers and a wood-pigeon. Then one frosty November morning he fired into a flock of plovers, killed one, and wounded another, which fell down on the crisp grass with such a wail of despair. "If you wing a bird, pick it up and wring its neck", he had been told. He picked up the struggling, heaving little mass of feathers, and with infinite repugnance and shut eyes tried to wring its neck. The bird struggled and squawked. George wrung harder and convulsively - and the whole head came off in his hand. The shock was unspeakable. He left the wretched body, and hurried home shuddering. Never again, never, never again would he kill things. He oiled his gun dutifully, as he had been told to do, put it away, and never touched it again. At nights he was haunted by the plover's wail and by the ghastly sight of the headless, bleeding bird's body. In the daytime he thought of them. He could forget them when he went out and sketches the calm trees and fields, or tried to design in his tranquil room. He pinged more deeply into painting than ever and thus ended one of the many attempts to "make a man" of George Winterbourne.
The business of "making a man" of him was pursued at School, but with little more success, even with the aid of compulsion.
"The type of boy we aim at turning out", the Head used to say to impressed parents", is a thoroughly manly fellow. We prepare for the Universities, of course, but our pride is in our excellent Sports Record.
There is an O.T.C., organised by Sergeant-Major Brown (who served throughout the South African war) and officered by the masters who have been trained in the Militia. Every boy must undergo six months' training, and is then competent to take up arms for his Country in an emergency".
The parents murmured polite approval, though rather tender mothers hoped the disciplins was not too strict and "the guns not too heavy for young arms". The Head was contemptuously and urbanely reassuring. On such occasions he invariably quoted these stirring and indeed immortal lines of Rudyard Kipling which end up, "You'll be a man, my son". It is so important to know how to kill. Indeed, unless you know to kill you cannot possibly be a Man, still less a Gentleman.
Notes.
Cruikshank, George
(b. Sept. 27, 1792, London, Eng.--d. Feb. 1, 1878, London), English artist, caricaturist, and illustrator who, beginning his career with satirical political cartoons and later illustrating topical and children's books, became one of the most prolific and popular masters of his art.
In 1811, when George was still in his teens, he gained opular success with a series of political caricatures that he created for the periodical The Scourge, a Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly. For the next 10 years Cruikshank satirized with fine irreverence the political policies of the Tories and Whigs.
His most famous book illustrations were for the novelist Charles Dickens in the latter's Sketches by "Boz" (1836-37) and Oliver Twist (1838
