Victorian literature Flashcards

Question

Matthew Arnold on unpoetical age

Answer 1

'...how deeply unpoetical the age and all one's surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving, -- but unpoetical'

Answer 2

'The Christian conception of God... is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth... God degenerated into the contradiction of life instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!'

Answer 3

'The question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical method, of a work of art'

Answer 4

'My Liverpool and Glasgow experiences laid upon my mind a conviction... of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century's civilization'

Answer 5

'Of all the Victorian novelists, he was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself'

Answer 6

'Poetry cannot, under pain of death or decline, assimilate itself to science or morality. It has not truth for its object. It has only itself'

Answer 7

'I was greatly struck with the skill with which he presented the facts from different points of view: this is masterly'

Answer 8

'Drama often shows more clearly and more quickly than other arts the deep patterns and changes in our general ideas of reality'

Answer 9

'Revivalism, whether it be of classicism or medievalism, is a seeking after dry bones'

Answer 10

'A woman's love is always freezing into fear. She wants everything, and is secure in nothing'

Answer 11

'To write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women is the real office they have to perform'

Answer 12

'For it seems to me that the poetical language of the age should the current language heightened'

Answer 13

'the truth is rarely pure and never simple'

Answer 14

'...the history of England is emphatically the history of progress'

Answer 15

Lady Bracknell: I sincerely hope nothing improbable is going to happen. The improbable is always in badger at any rate questionable taste.

Answer 16

'Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is for me: for that I came.'

Answer 17

'I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don't much mind it now; but if it always be so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself'

Answer 18

'Mr Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally; no, not even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake.'

Answer 19

'A married woman in England has no legal existence: her being is absorbed in that of her husband'

Answer 20

'[I]t is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject form various points of view'

Answer 21

'Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, / This close-companioned inarticulate hour / When twofold silence was the song of love'

Answer 22

'Blessed be those that grease the wheels 'of the old world, insomuch as to move on is better than to stand still

Answer 23

'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant - / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The truth's superb surprise.'

Answer 24

'Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power not merely of saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him'

Answer 25

'I don't like originals; I like translations [...] Isabel's written in foreign tongue. I can't make her out. She ought to marry an Armenian or a Portugese'

Answer 26

'all the stanza is one long strain, though written in lines asunder'

Answer 27

'Our tale is now done, and it only remains to us to collect the scattered threads of our little story, and to tie them into a seemly knot'

Answer 28

'The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, / | If faith overcomes doubt'

Answer 29

'The sensation novel did not just criticise social orthodoxies but explored the social and psychological processes by which these orthodoxies were constructed and maintained'

Answer 30

'Saying nothing [...] sometimes says the Most'

Answer 31

'The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is in a perpetual crisis'

Answer 32

'Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)

Answer 33

'[All] your lives seem to be spent in gathering together the materials for life [...] You are all striving for money. What do you want it for?'

Answer 34

'It is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to "fail|"".

Answer 35

'I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest'

Answer 36

'And is it that the haze of grief / Makes former gladness loom so great? / The lowness of the present state, / That sets the past in this relief?'

Answer 37

What is he buzzing in my ears? / 'Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?' Ah, reverent sir, not I!'

Answer 38

'Forward, forward, let us range, / | Let the great world spin forever down the raging grooves of change.'

Answer 39

'All violent feelings... produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterise as the "Pathetic Fallacy"'

Answer 40

'This desire to compose a new poetic form, one that would adapt established poetic styles to contemporary needs... typifies many Victorian poets'

Answer 41

'the disinterested objectivity have disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced'

Answer 42

'feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men'

Answer 43

'[A] treasure-house of detail... but an indifferent whole'

Answer 44

'Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse'

Answer 45

'Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness'

Answer 46

'all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead'

Answer 47

'This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners'

Answer 48

'there were many blank spaces on the earth [...] I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map'

Answer 49

'With memory set smarting like a re-opened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself'

Answer 50

'The author always seems to be warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past two o'clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone'

Answer 51

'Maturity-to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play'

Answer 52

'Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot'

Answer 53

'For centuries, the uncertain continents - Africa, the Americas, Asia, were figured in European writing as libidinously eroticized'

Answer 54

'We writers paint out of our heads, you see!'

Answer 55

'Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body'

Answer 56

'[Writing of this period] complicates gender boundaries, showing the proximity', rather than the opposition, of masculinity and femininity'

Answer 57

'On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality'

Answer 58

'The yoke of authority has been broken, and innumerable opinions, formerly received on tradition as incontestable, are put on their defence, and required to give an account of themselves'

Answer 59

'We talk of the odour of music and the timbre of a painting because we... are too lazy to undertake the analysis necessary to find out exactly what we do mean.'

Answer 60

'[N]or yet can a man write his voice'

Answer 61

'[N]ot only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them'

Answer 62

'[Writers of this period create] a perceptual grid in which a division between the normal and the deviant inherently imposes itself'

Answer 63

'What a book a devil's chaplain may write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature!'

Answer 64

'[S]he was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that coloured and changed her environment'

Answer 65

'The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious'

Answer 66

'They invent everything all over again about every five years, and it's a great thing to keep up with the new things'

Answer 67

'[H]ome is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserved; it is life's undress rehearsal, its back-room'