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Updated: May 19, 2025
To find the hidden treasure through the talisman of The Goldbug, or through the possession of analytical faculties such as those of the protagonist of Poe's tale? Much consideration will lead to the conclusion that one process is as marvellous as the other. It may be said that there is nothing miraculous in nature, and it may be said that it is all miraculous.
Sir Francis Hincks, a protagonist of Responsible Government, once quoted from the Report sentences which seemed to justify all his claims: "The crown must submit to the necessary consequences of representative institutions, and if it has to carry on the government in union with a representative body, it must consent to carry it on by means of those in whom that representative body has confidence"; and again, "I admit that the system which I propose would in fact place the internal government of the colony in the hands of the colonists themselves, and that we should thus leave to them the execution of the laws of which we have long entrusted the making solely to them."
This picture, this bright vision, spied through the clever ministration of a narrator, is not enough for Harry Richmond. Here the peopled view, all of it together, is like an actor in a play, and the interlocutor, the protagonist, is the man in the foreground, Harry himself.
This is intolerable. An artist, seen as the protagonist of a movement, the exponent of a theory, and the clue to an age, has a certain interest for all active-minded people; whereas, seen merely as an artist, which is how he must be seen if he is to be seen in the tradition, he is of interest only to those who care for art.
There was enough daring left in Florence to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero.
On a back seat, on the Liberal side of the House, silent, forlorn, unspeaking and unspoken to, he sat throughout the long and tedious debate in which he was a protagonist. There was, indeed, something shocking to the sense shocking in being so surprising that this should be the figure around which one of the fiercest and most tragic political struggles of our time should have surged.
The absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.
In the first place, we are asked to move more steadily in the aristocratic atmosphere where the novelist did not breathe to best advantage. Again, Richardson was an adept in drawing women rather than men and hence was self-doomed in electing a masculine protagonist. He is also off his proper ground in laying part of the action in Italy.
Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears" when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined for them. A heart accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a chief requisite for the protagonist of Victorian literature. Even Becky Sharp was touched once by Amelia's moving distress.
It is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes the position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so do even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not very accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the novel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incident and description, it is abundantly furnished.
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