Underground Man E-Book

H G Wells

• Herausgeber: FV Éditions
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

« The darkness deepens, the cries without die away, and nothing is left but the shift and falling of the incessant snow from roof to ground. » …Are we able to survive a solar extinction ? Can we live in complete darkness ?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Copyright

UNDERGROUND MAN

PREFACE

INTRODUCTORY

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

NOTE ON TARDE

Notes de bas de page

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 / FV Éditions

Cover : [email protected]

ISBN 979-10-299-0390-8

All Rights Reserved

UNDERGROUND MAN

By

GABRIEL TARDE

(1843-1904)

MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSORAT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE

TRANSLATED BY CLOUDESLEY BRERETON

WITH A PREFACE BY H.G. WELLS

— 1905 —

PREFACE

It reflects not at all on Mr Cloudesley Brereton's admirable work of translation to remark how subtly the spirit of such work as this of M. Tarde's changes in such a process. There are certain things peculiar, I suppose, to every language in the world, certain distinctive possibilities in each. To French far more than to English, belong the intellectual liveliness, the cheerful, ironical note, the professorial playfulness of this present work. English is a less nimble, more various and moodier tongue, not only in the sound and form of its sentences but in its forms of thought. It clots and coagulates, it proliferates and darkens, one jests in it with difficulty and great danger to a sober reputation, and one attempts in vain to figure Professor Giddings and Mr Benjamin Kidd, Doctor Beattie Crozier and Mr Wordsworth Donisthorpe glittering out into any so cheerful an exploit as this before us. Like Mr Gilbert's elderly naval man, they "never larks nor plays", and if indeed they did so far triumph over the turgid intricacies of our speech and the conscientious gravity of our style of thought, there would still be the English public to consider, a public easily offended by any lack of straightforwardness in its humorists, preferring to be amused by known and recognised specialists in that line, in relation to themes of recognised humorous tendency, and requiring in its professors as the concomitant of a certain dignified inaccessibility of thought and language, an honourable abstinence from the treacheries, as it would consider them, of irony and satire. Imagine a Story of the Future from Mr Herbert Spencer! America and the north of England would have swept him out of all respect.... But M. Tarde being not only a Member of the Institute and Professor at the College of France, but a Frenchman, was free to give these fancies that entertained him, public, literary, and witty expression, without self-destruction, and produce what has, in its English dress, a curiously unfamiliar effect. Yet the English reader who can overcome his natural disinclination to this union of intelligence and jesting will find a vast amount of suggestion in M. Tarde's fantastic abundance, and bringing his habitual gravity to bear may even succeed in digesting off the humour altogether, and emerging with edification of--it must be admitted--a rather miscellaneous sort.