Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories

Let the enjoyment be never so great, a sort of embarrassment always comes when the comedian oversteps the physical distance between himself and respectable people.

After a further exchange of meteorological commonplaces

only to confront them suddenly in a narrow passage whence there was no escape, and experience a moment of panic fear. Yet it would be untrue to say he suffered

Passion is like crime: it does not thrive on the established order and the common round, it welcomes every blow dealt the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric, because therein it feels a sure hope of its own advantage.

had been wont

Beauty makes people self-conscious," Aschenbach thought, and considered within himself imperatively why this should be.

banished from his style every common word

almost everything conspicuously great is great in despite: has come into being in defiance of affliction and pain; poverty, destitution, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstructions. And that was more than observation-it was the fruit of experience, it was precisely the formula of his life and fame, it was the key to his work.

en do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable-it is sympathy.

author of the lucid and vigorous prose epic on the life of Frederick the Great; careful, tireless weaver of the richly patterned tapestry entitled Maia, a novel that gathers up the threads of many human destinies in the warp of a single idea; creator of that powerful narrative The Abject, which taught a whole grateful generation that a man can still be capable of moral resolution even after he has plumbed the depths of knowledge; and lastly-to complete the tale of works of his mature period-the writer of that impassioned discourse on the theme of Mind and Art whose ordered force and antithetic eloquence led serious critics to rank it with Schiller's Simple and Sentimental Poetry.