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Updated: May 7, 2025
How improbable that no two lines of life of folk concerned should ever intersect thereafter, through nearly fifty years! And then, how about her father? how about possible half-brothers and sisters of hers? how improbable that they should remain quiescent and never seek to know anything about their own flesh and blood, surviving in England! What a tissue of improbabilities!
There had, therefore, been some meaning in the promise; and the clergyman had referred to it more than once or twice. "It is most improbable, you know, Mr. Greenwood," she had said very seriously. He had replied as seriously that such improbabilities were of frequent occurrence. "If it should happen I will do so," she had answered.
So also is the charming way in which an incident in the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated by her fancy, in the episode of Consuelo's flight from the castle, when he becomes her fellow-traveller, and their adventures across country are told with such zest and entrain, in pages where life-sketches of character, such as the good-natured, self-indulgent canon, the violent, abandoned Corilla, make us forget the wildest improbabilities of the fiction itself.
In what does the inferiority of Virgil, for example, consist, but in his having hatched fancies in his contemplations which the calm mind rejects as absurdities. Then Tasso, with his enchanted forests and his other improbabilities; are they more than childish tales? tales, too, not in fancy to be compared with those of that venerable dry-nurse, Mother Bunch.
It was improbable, also, to admit that some one was exactly opposite to Caffies window at the moment when he drew the curtains; more improbable yet to believe that this fact, insignificant in itself, that this vision, lasting only an instant, would be so solidly engraved in a woman's memory as to be distinctly remembered after several months, as if it dated from the previous evening; and yet, of all these improbabilities, there was formed a reality which enclosed him in such a way that at any moment it might stifle him.
Will the Hebrew child not love the land of its birth and feel the kinship with the people whose language and mode of life become its own? But why heap up improbabilities and impossibilities? The designation fastened upon us as a stigma was a fraud from the beginning, a conscious fraud and a malicious invention. It was "conceived in mischief and brought forth in iniquity."
Is there ever any, when a spoiled young beauty is ready to kiss the Arbiters of Destiny as a bribe, rather than give way about a whim, reasonable or unreasonable? And, after all, so many improbabilities having converged towards creating the situation, there was nothing so very unreasonable in Gwen's whim that old Mrs. Picture should go back with her to the Towers.
This circumstance, coming on the back of the monstrous improbabilities of the sale, was enough to have shaken the reason of Immanuel Kant. The earth seemed banded together to defeat them; the stones and the boys on the street appeared to be in possession of their guilty secret. Flight was their one thought.
And it seems to have been generally admitted, even by the most fervent admirers of Madame de Stael and of Corinne itself, that the first purpose has not had quite fair play with the other two. "A little thin," they confess of the story. In truth it could hardly be thinner, though the author has laid under contribution an at least ample share of the improbabilities and coincidences of romance.
I likewise prefer it to 'The Scarlet Letter'; but an author's opinion of his book just after completing it is worth little or nothing, he being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it too high or too low. "It has undoubtedly one disadvantage in being brought so close to the present time; whereby its romantic improbabilities become more glaring.
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