Tono-Bungay

Tono-Bungay

Most people in this world seem to live in character; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than character actors. They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of ones stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacksthe unjustifiable gifts of footmenin pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; andto go to my other extremeI was onceoh, glittering days!an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. Ive seen these people at various angles. At the dinner-table Ive met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasionit is my brightest memoryI upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empireHeaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him!in the warmth of our mutual admiration. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 718
Author: Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Release Date: Mar 18, 2006
Format: eBook
Language: English