Adventures Among Books E-Book

Andrew Lang

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Here we have Mr. Lang at his best. . . . The recollections, perhaps, are the best things in the book - of Stevenson, Dr. John Brown, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, all sympathetic, delicate, and perceptive in criticism, reticent to the point of shyness. But the lighter literary essays have that elusive humour of which we have spoken, even in a greater degree than the recollections, and in the " The Boy " Mr. Lang is almost rollicking - for Mr. Lang. This book is annotated with a rare extensive biographical sketch of the author, Andrew Lang, written by Sir Edmund Gosse, CB, a contemporary poet and writer. Contents: Preface Chapter I: Adventures Among Books Chapter Ii: Recollections Of Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter Iii: Rab's Friend Chapter Iv: Oliver Wendell Holmes Chapter V: Mr. Morris's Poems Chapter Vi: Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels Chapter Vii: A Scottish Romanticist Of 1830 Chapter Viii: The Confessions Of Saint Augustine Chapter Ix: Smollett Chapter X: Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter Xi: The Paradise Of Poets Chapter Xii: Paris And Helen Chapter Xiii: Enchanted Cigarettes Chapter Xiv: Stories And Story-Telling (From Strath Naver) Chapter Xv: The Supernatural In Fiction Chapter Xvi: An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher Chapter Xvii: The Boy Footnotes

Leseprobe

Adventures Among Books

Andrew Lang

Contents:

Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

Adventures Among Books

Preface

Chapter I: Adventures Among Books

Chapter Ii: Recollections Of Robert Louis Stevenson

Chapter Iii: Rab’s Friend

Chapter Iv: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Chapter V: Mr. Morris’s Poems

Chapter Vi: Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels

Chapter Vii: A Scottish Romanticist Of 1830

Chapter Viii: The Confessions Of Saint Augustine

Chapter Ix: Smollett

Chapter X: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Chapter Xi: The Paradise Of Poets

Chapter Xii: Paris And Helen

Chapter Xiii: Enchanted Cigarettes

Chapter Xiv: Stories And Story-Telling (From Strath Naver)

Chapter Xv: The Supernatural In Fiction

Chapter Xvi: An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher

Chapter Xvii: The Boy

Footnotes

Adventures Among Books, A. Lang

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Germany

ISBN: 9783849606718

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

ANDREW LANG (1844-1912)

Biographical Sketch from "Portraits And Sketches" by Edmund Gosse

INVITED to note down some of my recollections of Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between the sudden blow of his death and the slow development of memory, now extending in unbroken friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude and multitude of Lang's performances, public and private, during that considerable length of time almost paralyse expression; it is difficult to know where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written works are so extremely numerous as to make a pathway through them a formidable task in bibliography, no one book standing out predominant, so his character, intellectual and moral, was full -of so many apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I remember that seems to me to have been overlooked, or inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sympathetically, at the moment of his death, always premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland.

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, constantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. The great instance of versatility in literature is Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views of the same subject at different times of his life, and defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was through his long career singularly unaltered; he never changed his point of view; what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an elderly man. It is true that his interests and knowledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large number of channels, but while there was abundance there does not seem to me to have been versatility. If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always be the same; unless there is an earthquake, new cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In some authors earthquakes do take place as in Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge but nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of expanding my view of his intellectual development.