Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (Volume 5 de 5)

by Hippolyte Taine

1^o Coats should have nothing of the triangle about them; at the same time, wrinkles behind should be carefully avoided.

2^o The collar is a very important point: it should be low behind, and slightly rolled.

3^o No licence of fashion can allow a man of delicate taste to adopt the posterial luxuriance of a Hottentot.

4^o There is safety in a swallow-tail.

5^o The good sense of a gentleman is nowhere more finely developed than in his rings.

6^o It is permitted to mankind, under certain restrictions, to wear white waistcoats.

7^o The trowsers must be exceedingly tight across the hips.

All which proposition I, for the present, content myself with modestly but peremptorily and irrevocably denying.

[75]: I might call them two boundless and indeed unexampled electric machines (turned by the «machinery of society») with batteries of opposite quality, Drudgism the negative, Dandyism the positive; one attracts hourly toward it and appropriates all the positive electricity of the nation (namely the money thereof); the other is equally busy with the negative (that is to say the hunger), which is equally potent. Hitherto you see only partial transient sparkles and sputters; but wait a little, till the entire nation is in an electric state; till your whole vital electricity, no longer healthfully neutral, is cut into two isolated portions of positive and negative (of money and of hunger), and stands there bottled up in two world-batteries. The stirring of a child's finger brings the two together, and then....

[76]: Deep hidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial central fire, with stratum after stratum of arrangement, traditionary method, composed productiveness, all built above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it: justice, clearness, silence, perseverance unhasting, unresting diligence, hatred of disorder, hatred of injustice, which is the worst disorder, characterise this people: the inward fire we say, as all such fires would be, is hidden in the centre. Deep hidden, but awakenable, but immeasurable; let no man awaken it.