Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
At the same time the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely read than he is were it not for those too frequent longueurs and inert paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship.
The whole thing is full of the yearning spirit of spring; and, not at all strangely, bears a marked family likeness to Siegfried's song about his mother in the Ring. Throughout the deliberations of the masters the music remains at a high level: there are no longueurs; dry recitative and barren attempts to treat prose poetically alike are absent.
It proceeded with the delays and longueurs that are inseparable from the sluggish majesty of the law. One of these pauses I wrote to Philip, inviting him to desist, and to grant me the liberty to live out my days in peace with my family in some remote corner of his kingdom.
The Jardines always felt about Christmas Day that the best of it was over in the morning the stockings and the presents and the postman, leaving long, over-eaten, irritable hours to be got through before bedtime and oblivion. This year Jock had drawn out a time-table to ensure that the day held no longueurs.
In the Ring and Parsifal as in Lohengrin and Tannhäuser there are longueurs; in Tristan there are none: not a bar can be cut; there is not a bar that does not hold us. In a paradoxical mood, or irritated, by being obstinately, wilfully, stupidly regarded as one of the trade setters of opera-texts, Wagner declared to Bülow that "one thing is certain, I am not a musician."
How, then, it could have entered into the mind of the most sanguine projector to suppose that the longueurs and the difficulty of the Friend would be patiently borne with for the sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossible to understand.
Even at that time, libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others, people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what was then called "neat" wine the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape. The longueurs and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure.
There is not in all Vanity Fair a single dull page that we skip, not a bit of padding, no rigmarole of explanation whilst the action stands still. Of what other fiction can this be said? Richardson and even Fielding have their longueurs. Miss Austen is too prone to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience.
Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tired of the same story told over and over from the different points of view, and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificent breadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himself heavily.
Whenever Mr. Bennett succeeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as the detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in War and Peace, or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in Anna Karenin, or the nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified his method with all its longueurs. Has he justified it yet?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking