Sublime

‘Ancient Tragedy is loss of life, modern Tragedy is loss of

Doran highlighted the political aspect of the play, and this was to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past.

Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm

Joseph Conrad (Józef Korzeniowski)

The matter can only be roughly stated in one way. Dickens did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology.

the rough upshot of it was something like this: that some traditions too old to be traced came in vague conflict with some theories much too new to be tested. Many things three thousand years old had forgotten their reason for existing; many things a few years old had not yet discovered theirs.

This boy who dropped down groaning at his work, who was hungry four or five times a week, whose best feelings and worst feelings were alike flayed alive, was the man on whom two generations of comfortable critics have visited the complaint that his view of life was too rosy to be anything but unreal.