The Master - A Novel

J. A. Hammerton, Israel Zangwill

Description

“The Master ” is a 1907 novel by British author Israel Zangwill (1864–1926). A thought-provoking novel that tackles such issues as class and the creation of art, based on the life of his friend and illustrator George Wylie Hutchinson. Contents include: “Solitude”, “The Dead Man Makes His First And Last Appearance”, “The Thoughts Of Youth”, “'Man Proposes'”, “Peggy The Water-Drinker”, “Disillusions”, etc. Zangwill was a leading figure in cultural Zionism during the 19th century, as well as close friend of father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. In later life, he renounced the seeking of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Other notable works by this author include: “Dreamers of the Ghetto” (1898) and “Ghetto Tragedies” (1899). This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter from “English Humourists of To-Day” by J. A. Hammerton.

Sujets

• 19th century London
• Culture of the United Kingdom
• Marriage

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528790048
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE MASTER
A NOVEL
WITH A CHAPTER FROM English Humorists of To-day BY J. A. HAMMERTON
By
ISRAEL ZANGWILL

First published in 1895


This edition published by Read Books Ltd. Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library


Contents
Israel Zangwill
PROEM
BOOK I
CHAPTER I SOLITUDE
CHAPTER II THE DEAD MAN MAKES HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE
CHAPTER III THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH
CHAPTER IV “MAN PROPOSES”
CHAPTER V PEGGY THE WATER-DRINKER
CHAPTER VI DISILLUSIONS
CHAPTER VII THE APPRENTICE
CHAPTER VIII A WANDER-YEAR
CHAPTER IX ARTIST AND PURITAN
CHAPTER X EXODUS
BOOK II
CHAPTER I IN LONDON
CHAPTER II GRAINGER’S
CHAPTER III THE ELDER BRANCH
CHAPTER IV THE PICTURE-MAKERS
CHAPTER V A SYMPOSIUM
CHAPTER VI THE OUTCAST
CHAPTER VII TOWARDS THE DEEPS
CHAPTER VIII “GOLD MEDAL NIGHT”
CHAPTER IX DEFEAT
CHAPTER X MATT RECEIVES SUNDRY HOSPITALITIES
CHAPTER XI A HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE
BOOK III
CHAPTER I CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED?
CHAPTER II “SUCCESS”
CHAPTER III “VAIN-LONGING”
CHAPTER IV FERMENT
CHAPTER V A CELEBRITY AT HOME
CHAPTER VI A DEVONSHIRE IDYL
CHAPTER VII THE IDYL CONCLUDES
CHAPTER VIII ELEANOR WYNDWOOD
CHAPTER IX RUTH HAILEY
CHAPTER X THE MASTER


Illustrations
Israel Zangwill
“ ‘There!’ Said Olive, puffing out a thin cloud”
“He placed himself with his back to the door”
“ ‘I am afire with thirst,’ she cried.”
“ ‘Lor’ bless you, sir,’ said she, ‘i’m not worryin’ about the rent’ ”
“ ‘Good-night,’ she said, softly.”
“Matt dined with Herbert at a little table”
“All was very still save for the eternal monotone of the sea”
“Something in the scene thrilled him with a sense of restful kinship”


Israel Zangwill
This picture though it is not much Like Zangwill, is not void of worth It has one true Zangwillian touch It looks like nothing else on earth.
Oliver Herford Confessions of a Caricaturist,
Perhaps some one will suggest that Mr. Israel Zangwill is a humorist only as one whom "we loved long since and lost awhile," because of late years — indeed, for more than a decade — little that is entirely humorous has come from his pen. On the other hand, he has never been a humorist who inspires affection: he is somewhat too intellectual for that. There is no novelist who, with greater justice, takes himself and his art more seriously than Mr. Zangwill has done since, in 1892, he wrote that masterpiece of modern fiction, Children of the Ghetto ; yet, as he began his literary career as a humorous writer and is beyond question one of our masters of epigrammatic wit and intellectual point—de—vice, he may with sufficient reason be included in any survey of modern humour. Moreover, despite the high and serious purpose of all his later work, his attendant imps of mirth are ever at his elbow, and we find him with welcome frequency acknowledging their presence in the writing of even his soberest stories.
Born to Jewish parents in London forty—three years ago, Mr Zangwill shares the distonction of such celebrities as Napoleon and Wellington in not knowing his birthday. He is aware that the year was 1864, but the day would seem to have been "wropt in mystery." He has, however, got over the difficulty by choosing his own birthday, and for this purpose he selected February 14. "It is not merely." he says, "that St. Valentine's Day is the very day for a novelist," but he has a dog "whose pedigree has been more carefully kept" than his own, and it bears the name Valentine from having been born on the saint's day, master and dog can celebrate their birthday together. This canine favourite he has thus addressed in verse:
Accept from me these birthday lines— If every dog must have his dog, How bless'd to have St.Valentine's!
But, asked on one occasion to give the date of his birthday, Mr.Zangwill replied, expressing his inability to do so, and suggested that the inquirer might "select some nice convenient day, a roomy one, on which he would not be jostled by bigger men."
As he is eminently original in his personality as well as in his work, it is not surprising to know that during his boyhood his favourite reading was not found among the conventional classics, but that he loved to rove in the strange realms of fiction created by writers whose names will be found nowhere in the annals of bookland; the fabricators of cheap boy's stories to wit. Yet his scholastic training was eminently respectable, as he was the most successful scholar of his time at the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields, and before he was twenty—one he had graduated B.A. at the London University with triple honours.
J. A. Hammerton English Humorists of To-day, 1907





Isr ael Zangwill




“ ‘There!’ Said Olive, puffing out a thin cloud”


PROEM
Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in no incompatible union, ’twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace, did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land over which France and England might well bicker when first they met oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards.
At Minudie, at Clare in Annapolis County, where the goodly apples grew, lay such fragments of old France, simple communities shutting out the world and time, marrying their own, tilling their good dyke land, and picking up the shad that the retreating tide left on the exposed flats; listening to the Angelus, and baring their heads as some Church procession passed through the drowsy streets. They had escaped the Great Expulsion, nor had joined in the exodus of “Evangeline,” and, sprinkled about the country, were compatriots of theirs who had drifted back when the times grew more sedate; but for the most part it was the Saxon that profited by the labors of the pioneer Gaul, repairing the tumble-down farms and the dilapidated dykes, possessing himself of embanked marsh lands, and replanting the plum-trees and the quinces his predecessor had naturalized. For the revolt of the States against Britain sent thousands of American loyalists flocking into this “New Scotland,” which thus became a colony of “New England.” Scots themselves flowed in from auld Scotland, and the German came to sink himself in the Briton, and a band of Irish adventurers, under the swashbuckling Colonel McNutt, arrived with a grant of a million acres that they were not destined to occupy. The Acadian repose had fled forever. The sparse Indian hastened to make himself scarcer, conscious there was no place for him in the new order, and disappearing deliciously in hogsheads of rum. The virgin greenwood rang with axes, startling the bear and the moose. Crash! Down went pine and beech, hemlock and maple, their stumps alone left to rot and enrich the fields. Crash!—thud! The weasel grew warier, the astonished musquash vanished in eddying circles. Bridges began to span the rivers where the beaver built its dams in happy unconsciousness of the tall cylinder that was about to crown civilization. The caribou and the silver fox pressed inland to save their skins. The snare was set in the wild-wood, and the crack of the musket followed the ring of the axe. The mackerel and the herring sought destruction in shoals, and the seines brimmed over with salmon and alewives and gaspereux. The wild land that had bloomed with golden-rod and violets was tamed with crops, and plump sheep and fat oxen pastured where the wild strawberry vine had trailed or the bull-frog had croaked under the alders. A sturdy, ingenious race the fathers of the new settlement, loving work almost as much as they feared God; turning their hand to anything, and opening it wide to the stranger. They raised their own houses, and fashioned their own tools, and shod their own horses, and later built their own vessels, and even sailed them to the great markets laden with the produce of their own fields and the timber from their ownsaw-mills. There were women in this workaday paradise—shapely, gentle creatures, whose hands alone were rough with field and house-work; women who span and sang when the winter night-winds whistled round the settlement. The dramas of love and grief began to play themselves out where the raccoon and the chickadee had fleeted the golden hours in careless living. Children came to make the rafters habitable, and Death to sanctify them with memories. The air grew human with the smoke of hearths, the forest with legends and histories. And as houses grew into homes and villages into townships, Church and State arose where only Faith and Freedom had been.
The sons and heirs of