Without Lifting A Finger

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903 with substantial revisions and published in its original form in 1964 as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh ). Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy , evolutionary thought , and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] (Wikipedia)

“My boy,” returned my father, “you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings.  Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition?  Would a single one of those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition now?  Why, the Academy people would be so outraged that they would not even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away.  Phew!” continued he, waxing warm, “if old Pontifex had had Cromwell’s chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had had Giotto’s chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I will undertake to say he never scamped a job in the whole course of his life.” “But,” said I, “we cannot judge people with so many ‘ifs.’  If old Pontifex had lived in Giotto’s time he might have been ...

 

"No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before — now these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman. "I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy. It's not I that am to blame," he told himself, "but she. But I have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me…" Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his sentiments were as much changed as towards her, ceased to interest him. The only thing that interested him now was the question of in what way he could best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with most justice, extricate himself from the mud with which she had spattere...

Levin looked about him and hardly recognized the place, everything was so changed. The immense stretch of meadow had been mown and was sparkling with a peculiar fresh brilliance, with its lines of already sweet-smelling grass in the slanting rays of the evening sun. And the bushes about the river had been cut down, and the river itself, not visible before, now gleaming like steel in its bends, and the moving, ascending, peasants, and the sharp wall of grass of the unmown part of the meadow, and the hawks hovering over the stripped meadow — all was perfectly new. Raising himself, Levin began considering how much had been cut and how much more could still be done that day.

How exquisite this steely water is!" said Sergey Ivanovitch. "These riverside banks always remind me of the riddle — do you know it? 'The grass says to the water: we quiver and we quiver.'" "I don't know the riddle," answered Levin wearily. &&& Some background info on the Russian traditional riddle (via Google AI): No, they do not all speak in the excerpt from Anna Karenina , but yes, they all speak in the full traditional riddle that Tolstoy was referencing. [ 1 ] When Sergey Ivanovich quotes the riddle to Levin in the novel, he only recites the very last line: "The grass says to the water: we sway and we sway" (or "we quiver and we quiver" depending on your translation). [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] However, Tolstoy included the complete, unabridged folk riddle in his 1872 ABC Book ( Азбука ) , where each of the three elements gets a speaking part: [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] The River says: "We will run and run." The Banks say: ...