Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg

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Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg Page 32

by Isaac Rosenberg


  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

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  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)

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  Jules Verne

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  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  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

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  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
<
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

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  Samuel Butler

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  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

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  Rafael Sabatini

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  Samuel Pepys

  Sir Issac Newton

  Stanley J. Weyman

  Thomas De Quincey

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  Ancient Classics

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  Plotinus

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  Delphi Poets Series

  A. E. Housman

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  Beowulf

  Charlotte Smith

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  D. H Lawrence (poetry)

  Dante Alighieri (English)

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  Delphi Poetry Anthology

  Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)

  Edmund Spenser

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  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Emily Dickinson

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  Friedrich Schiller (English)

  George Herbert

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  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Isaac Rosenberg

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  Matthew Arnold

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  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Robert Browning

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  Rumi

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  Thomas Hardy (poetry)

  Thomas Hood

  T. S. Eliot

  W. B. Yeats

  Walt Whitman

  Wilfred Owen

  William Blake

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  Masters of Art

  Caravaggio

  Claude Monet

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  Raphael

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  Wassily Kandinsky

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  Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Nord-Pas-de-Calais — Rosenberg’s final resting place

  Rosenberg’s grave

 

 

 


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