"The world, as I see it, has become too easy and cushioned. Men have forgotten their manhood in soft speech, and they have imagined that the rules of their smug civilisation were the laws of the universe....When mankind is smothered with shams and phrases and painted idols a wind blows out of the wilds to cleanse and simplify life. The world needs space and fresh air. The civilisation we have boasted of is a toy-shop and a blind alley, and I hanker for open country."
This confounded nonsense was well received.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Wednesday, August 02, 2017
Nonsense
John Buchan (1875-1940), Greenmantle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, ©1916), p. 228: