From George Eliots Silly Novels by Lady Novelists: The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of them by the same elevated style. Commonplace people would say that a copy of Shakespeare lay on a drawing-room table; but the authoress of “The Enigma,” bent on edifying periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the table, “that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart through the little name, ‘Shakespeare.’” A watchman sees a light burning in an upper window rather longer than usual, and thinks that people are foolish to sit up late when they have an opportunity of going to bed; but, lest this fact should seem too low and common, it is presented to us in the following striking and metaphysical manner: “He marvelled—as a man will think for others in a necessarily separate personality, p. 191consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise—how differently he should act, how gladly he should prize the rest so lightly held of within.”
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:03:20 +0000
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