Word: reader
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Significance would be greater if Author Masters had not tried to pack so much significance into a brilliantly told, well constructed boy-story. Like red pepper, alle gory should not be sprinkled so thickly that the reader sneezes. Author Masters brings a little too much of the technique of his poetry to novel-writing, but since his poetry is largely grim and biting realism, this treatment does not dam age his work irreparably...
Throughout the novel the reader expects Bernard to do something. To the very end there is a feeling that it is a long prologue on a fully set stage. The characters are introduced, the minor ones involve themselves in minor episodes, but nothing much ever happens to the hero. One love-affair fizzles out, another is aborted, but these are merely by the way. When at last the formidable grandfather dies, Bernard has been in the rut too long and has forgotten his dreams. The cloth-mills are the inevitable, the Fates, to Bernard Quesnay. Their prosperity, strikes, slumps, trade...
...raising her eyes to the stars even if, like the old philosopher, her footsteps sometimes stumbled on the ground." She is at her best in discussing the novels; frankly stating the defects of each and the length and the occasional excursions into philosophy which hold off the modern reader, she yet brings out strongly the beauty, truth and power of the author at her best. She writes as one who admires George Eliot; but who is aware of her limitations, while even more aware of her extraordinary powers...
...Lampoon, however, is not ironic but kindly. It beams with benevolence, like the Christian Science Monitor. It is the Pickwick among college funny papers; a smiling old philanthropist, with a fondness for old friends, old wine and old jokes. Only at intervals in this issue will the reader cut himself on the razor edge of real wit. There is a paragraph in the south-west corner of page 232 which would have made F. P. A. very happy had he thought of it. The parody of the sainted Bruce Barton on page 237 is clean-cut work; and Reynal...
...exact line of demarcation which separates the scholar from the pedant has never been determined to the satisfaction of any one man, much less an academy. One may always accuse a scholar of being pedantical merely, as Professor Kittredge has pointed out, because his work is uninteresting to the reader as an individual; and the fact that others may find the same matter intensely vital and alive does not remove the ignominy of its having failed to attract at least one person. Only occasionally comes there a man who contrives to build up a structure on the basis of carefully...