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The originality of To the Finland Station lies not in its direct narrative or in its factuality but in its study of the writing and acting of history. The task Wilson sets himself is to follow the devious yet constantly renewed threads in the texture of conspiracy. His people and their actions are born when their minds make their act of discovery... When Wilson moves on to Renan, Taine, France and, briefly, to the Symbolists in order to show the ossification of the once Romantic impulse, the biographical detail links their thinking to their lives. And biography plays a major part as his grand examination of Babeuf, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lassalle, Lenin and Trotsky expands. It is amusingly typical of Wilson that he should turn to one of Meredith’s novels for an oblique glance at Lassalle...
To the Finland Station is perhaps the only book on the grand scale to come out of the Thirties - in either England or America. It contains to a novel degree the human history of an argument, from its roots to its innumerable branches, domestic and emotional... It is because it never loses sight of the pain gnawing at the heart of the human conscience that Wilson’s discursive record, untouched by rhetoric, achieves pages one can only call noble.
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One day in the January of 1824, a young French professor named Jules Michelet, who was teaching philosophy and history, found the name of Giovanni Vico in a translator's note to a book he was reading.
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The ordinary historian knows what is going to happen in the course of his historical narrative because he knows what has really happened, but Michelet is able to put us back at upper stages of the stream of time, so that we grope with the people of the past themselves, share their heroic faiths, are dismayed by their unexpected catastrophes, feel, for all our knowledge of after-the-event, that we do not know precisely what is coming.
Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous—in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation; in the energy of the faculty that combines, articulating at the same time that it compresses; in the wit and the metaphorical phantasmagoria that transfigures the prosaic phenomena of politics, and in the pulse of the tragic invective—we have heard its echo in Bernard Shaw —which can turn the collapse of an incompetent parliament, divided between contradictory tendencies, into the downfall of a damned soul of Shakespeare.
Here the faithful from Brook Farm ultimately migrated; and here found refuge the political exiles from France. Here died George Arnold, the poet, who, brought up in the Fourierist community and having watched it go to pieces in his teens, would return to the old refuge at intervals to write, among the honeysuckle or the crickets, his poems of epicurean loafing or elegiac resignation; and here was born Alexander Woollcott, who learned here whatever it is in him that compels him to throw up his radio engagement rather than refrain from criticism of the Nazis.
George Meredith, in The Tragic Comedians, which follows with close fidelity a memoir published by Helene von Donniges, put his finger on the basic impulse that ruined the career of Lassalle. It was rather his pride than his chivalry that was excessive and a little insane. Though Meredith deals only with his love affair and does not carry the story back, it had been pride from the very beginning which had asserted itself as a stumbling-block to his projects at the same time that it had stimulated his heroism.
But there was something very odd about Aveling. He was an inveterate and shameless dead-beat—if it is possible to use so brutal a phrase for the man who suggested Louis Dubedat, the slippery but talented artist of Bernard Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma. Though startlingly and repulsively ugly, his eloquence and his charm were so great that H. M. Hyndman says that he "needed but half an hour's start of the handsomest man in London" to fascinate an attractive woman—a power which he used very unscrupulously.
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.