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Updated: May 12, 2025
"Would you mind telling me," Lansing continued in the same dead-level tone, "exactly for what services we've both been so handsomely paid?" "The pearl is beautiful," Susy murmured, to gain time, while her head spun round with unimaginable terrors. "So are your sapphires; though, on closer examination, my services would appear to have been valued rather higher than yours.
Nowhere do all the elements of Tragedy and Comedy play so strange a part as on the dead-level of this American stage. It is because it is so dead a level that we fail to see the part they play because "furious Goth and fiery Hun" meet, not on the battle-field, but in the horse-car, dropping their cents together in a Slawson box. For example, as to the tragedy.
The extra-poor men and the extra-good men always stick their heads up above the dead-level of good-enough men; the first to holler for help, and the second to get an extra reach. And when your attention is attracted to one of these men, follow him up and find out just what sort of soil and fertilizer he needs to grow fastest.
Thus, I think, the line between animal and human psychology may be pretty clearly drawn. It is not a dead-level line. Instinct is undoubtedly often modified by intelligence, and intelligence is as often guided or prompted by instinct, but one need not hesitate long as to which side of the line any given act of man or beast belongs.
The universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments of human activity this is the strong side; and through this side of her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results, and is destined, we may depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness, her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times make us cry out, to an immense development.
One of these days somebody will come along who can write about them. I have started out without a writer. Beyond these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women.
If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but God for us all then indeed we might despair.
=The man who lacks a sense of humor.= There was no answer to this question, or, rather, he himself was the answer. Such a man is obviously outside the pale, without hope of redemption. If such a story, told by such a raconteur, could not touch him, he is hopeless. In his spiritual landscape there are no undulations, but it reveals itself as a monotonous dead-level without stream or verdure.
Towards the north the descents are equally sudden, and the panorama of the Vale of Pickering, extending from the hills behind Scarborough to Helmsley far away in the west, is most remarkable. Down below lies the circumscribed plain, dead-level except for one or two isolated hillocks.
"My dear," said Jan, "what with my gregarious niece and my too-attractive nurse, I think it's a good thing we're all going down to Wren's End, where the garden-walls are high and the garden fairly large. Besides all that, there will be that dog with the teeth 'dead-level and big." "Remember," said Meg. "He treated me like a princess always."
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