History of English Literature Volume 2 (of 3)Taine, Hippolyte
History
History of English Literature Volume 2 (of 3)
Taine, Hippolyte
English literature -- History and criticism
In this great manufactory of morality, where every loom goes on as
regularly as its neighbor, with a monotonous noise, we distinguish two
which sound louder and better than the rest--Barrow and South. Not that
they were free from dulness. Barrow had all the air of a college pedant,
and dressed so badly that one day in London, before an audience who did
not know him, he saw almost the whole congregation at once leave the
church. He explained the word εύχαριστέΐν in the pulpit with
all the charm of a dictionary, commenting, translating, dividing,
subdividing like the most formidable of scholiasts,[524] caring no more
for the public than for himself; so that once, when he had spoken for
three hours and a half before the Lord Mayor, he replied to those who
asked him if he was not tired, "I did, in fact, begin to be weary of
standing so long." But the heart and mind were so full and so rich, that
his faults became a power. He had a geometrical method and
clearness,[525] an inexhaustible fertility, extraordinary impetuosity
and tenacity of logic, writing the same sermon three or four times over,
insatiable in his craving to explain and prove, obstinately confined to
his already overflowing thoughts, with a minuteness of division, an
exactness of connection, a superfluity of explanation, so astonishing
that the attention of the hearer at last gives way; and yet the mind
turns with the vast engine, carried away and doubled up as by the
rolling weight of a flattening-machine.
Let us listen to his sermon, "Of the Love of God." Never was a more
copious and forcible analysis seen in England, so penetrating and
unwearying a decomposition of an idea into all its parts, a more
powerful logic, more rigorously collecting into one network all the
threads of a subject:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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