Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Curiously, the critics of the time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted, also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of "Traviata" the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets again by making her give up his son.
Several of the weekly and monthly magazines circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies; and one weekly periodical which presented newspaper opinion of all shades of political partisanship had a circulation of 750,000 copies for every issue. The rise of the "muck-rake" magazines was typical of the ten years at the opening of the twentieth century.
The parlour full of dust, and how the dust was raised and laid; Passion and Patience; the man in the iron cage; the spider-room; the muck-rake room; the robin with its red breast and its pretty note, and yet with its coarse food; the tree, green outside but rotten at the heart, all the thanks the Interpreter took that day for all that from Feeble-mind was in such speeches as these: You make me lose my head.
He looked back to divers hours when he had given himself wholly to the love of God, and to the long reaches of time between them, in which he had not cast away the muck-rake, but had trailed it after him with one hand as he walked forward, looking to the angel and the crown. He seemed to see St. Peter pointing to the life all which he had professed to devote while he had kept back part; and St.
INTER. Thou hast said the right, said He, and his muck-rake doth show his carnal mind. And whereas thou seest him rather give heed to rake up straws and sticks, and the dust of the floor, than to what He says that calls to him from above with the celestial crown in His hand, it is to show that Heaven is but as a fable to some, and that things here are counted the only things substantial.
Peter said, "Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God." Perhaps this man would not have been wiser than many other men in his choice had he not looked at the gathering of his muck-rake and in that found no comfort.
There stood also one over His head with a celestial crown in His hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake; but the man did neither look up, nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and dust of the floor. Then said Christiana, I persuade myself that I know somewhat the meaning of this; for this is a figure of a man of this world, is it not, good Sir?
There are, for instance, big facts and little facts, clean facts and dirty facts. Imagination raises you and gives you a high and comprehensive view of them all; your mere reason keeps you down in some noisome corner, like the man with the muck-rake." "Hear, hear!" cried the journalist and the artist heartily. "You're wrong, Julius," said Embro, "quite wrong.
When one of these old war-horses once got started, he would tell tales of deviltry to appall the soul of the hardiest muck-rake man. It was always the other fellow, of course; but then, if you pinned your man down, and if he thought that he could trust you he would acknowledge that he had sometimes fought the enemy with the enemy's own weapons!
But it could hardly have taken place at least at the time and in the way it did without the great upheaval of 1896, without the publicity which the "muck-rake" magazines and daily newspapers were able to offer, without the industrial consolidations of 1898 and later, and without the refusal of industry and the railways to obey earlier and less drastic laws, and their skilled and insistent attempts to find loop-holes in legislation.
Word Of The Day