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More "Protagonist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too-little-appreciated masterpiece of sensational burlesque called The Realist. However, The Plot-Maker, once set going, develops admirably enough on lines entirely its own. The so-much-an-hour hero turns out an engaging young gentleman, but a wofully poor protagonist. The situation where (in the midst of whirling events) he makes the startling discovery that he himself has been in some way switched on to the part of villain is one that you can appreciate only at first hand. Certainly if you want (as who does not in these days?) an anaesthetic of agreeable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... William Shakspeare, the protagonist on the great arena of modern poetry, and the glory of the human intellect, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, in the year 1564, and upon some day, not precisely ascertained, in the month of April. It is certain that he was baptized on the 25th; and from that fact, combined ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the protagonist of "executive power" was Alexander Hamilton, who appealed to the clause in defense of Washington's proclamation of neutrality, issued on the outbreak of war between France and Great Britain. Prompted by Jefferson to take up his pen and "cut him to pieces in face ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... than those already touched upon, is found in the increasing importance of woman as a central) factor in society; indeed, holding the key to the social situation. The drama of our time, in so frequently making woman the protagonist of the piece, testifies, as does fiction, to this significant fact: woman, in the social and economic readjustment that has come to her, or better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more dominant ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... born in 1717, at Cefncoed Farm, near Llandovery. Three years younger than Harris, (an Oxford graduate,) and educated only at a village school and an academy at Llwynllwyd, he was the song protagonist of the holy campaign as the other was its champion preacher. From first to last Williams wrote nine hundred and sixteen hymns, some of which are still heard throughout the church militant, and others survive in local use and affection. He died Jan. 11, 1791, at Pantycelyn, where he ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... The dramatic interest is intensified by the warning of Artemidorus and the suggestion of a way of escape for the protagonist. ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... too young, his precocity as poet and master of fantastic prose has yet not the complexion of a Chatterton or a Keats. In his literary remains, slender enough as to quantity, there is little to suggest a fuller development if he had lived. Like his protagonist Arthur Rimbaud—surely the most extraordinary poetic apparition of the nineteenth century—Jules Laforgue accomplished his destiny during the period when most poets are moulding their wings preparatory to flight. He flew in youth, flew moonward, for his patron goddess was Selene, he her faithful ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the negotiations which were then hastily improvised, Germany, who strove hard to gain credit for the role of disinterested peacemaker, gradually revealed herself as the chief protagonist, whereas Austria was little more than a pawn in the game. Disguising her eagerness to provoke one of the two desired solutions, Russia's abandonment of Serbia or her declaration of war, Germany succeeded in misleading the Governments ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... redder. The standard of common sense is high in Scotland; the humiliation in being taken in profound; the respect for the professional orthodoxies intense. And he had been the protagonist of everything sensible, orthodox, and prudent! He felt like a ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... sublimity to the Niagaras, and the oceans, and the human heart, and the words of God. This drama is sublimity's self. Theme, actors, movement, goal, pertinency to the deepest needs of soul and experience, and chiefly, God as protagonist, say that sublimity belongs to this drama as naturally as to the prodigious mountains or to the desert at night. "Surely, God is in this place, and ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... he took his evening rest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrable shade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is not a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarous and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... keen champion of the ritualistic school. He edited The Church and State Review (1862-1865). Secular state education and the "conscience clause" were anathema to him. Until the end of his life he remained a protagonist in theological controversy and a keen fighter against latitudinarianism and liberalism; but the sharpest religious or political differences never broke his personal friendships and his Christian charity. Among other things for which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... we commented, yet a protagonist of the peasant might point out that it was perhaps as noble and certainly quite as useful to be held by a passion for the soil as to be caught by the glamour of men riding out to slaughter. And Zola puts this in the mind of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... energy and the inexorable comparison he had made. It was true! Cobalt was nearly lost to them, and now the iron of Algoma had passed into other hands. Old bankers and financiers cast their minds back and were surprised at the number of similar instances they recalled. And here was Clark, the protagonist, Clark the speculator, Clark the wild man from Philadelphia, demonstrating in the cold language to which they were accustomed and which they perfectly understood, that he had done the same thing over again and on a more ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... little space of saw-dusted, hard-beaten earth that divided him from W. Keyse, and drew up beside that insignificant minority. The action was not purposeless or unimpressive. The alcoholic wastrel had suddenly become protagonist in the common little drama that was veering towards tragedy. Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of destruction, its barbettes full of unseen, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... object and the limitations of philosophy, Hume shows himself the spiritual child and continuator of the work of Locke, he appears no less plainly as the parent of Kant and as the protagonist of that more modern way of thinking, which has been called "agnosticism," from its profession of an incapacity to discover the indispensable conditions of either positive or negative knowledge, in many propositions, respecting which, not only the vulgar, but philosophers of the more sanguine sort, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... to institute a single undivided legislature. It was the Pennsylvanian model and Voltaire had pronounced Pennsylvania the best government in the world. Franklin gave the sanction of an oracle to the constitution of his state, and Turgot was its vehement protagonist in Europe. ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and Ea induced his son, Marduk to be present. We next find Anshar in converse with the god Marduk, who offers to act as the champion of the gods and to fight Timat and her allies. Marduk being a form of the Sun-god, the greatest of all the powers of light, thus becomes naturally the protagonist of the gods, and the adversary of Timat and her powers of darkness. Then Anshar summoned a great council of the gods, who forthwith met in a place called "Upshukkinaku", which may be described as the Babylonian Olympus. ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... or a "David Copperfield;" of that you may be morally certain, however, it is no mock self-disparagement (!) that moves me to humbly acknowledge (!) my inferiority to this immortal mind. I have availed myself of the only alternative left, when I recognized the impossibility of rivalling this protagonist among the dramatis personae of the great Drama of English Fiction, and have done something of which he speaks very tenderly and delicately somewhere in his prolific writings, one's "best." He says, "one man's best is as good as another man's," ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the king's son, Marko Kraljevi['c], and thereabouts are the remains of his churches and monasteries. But for the Serbs and the Bulgars Marko is associated with deeds of valour; he has become the protagonist of a grand cycle of heroic songs, wherein his wondrous exploits are recalled. Although he was, by force of circumstances, a Turkish vassal, and, fighting under them, he perished in Roumania in 1394, so that historically he may not have played a very helpful ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... pretty, but is it Sophocles?—or Swinburne? Still, grace there is, and distinction, in all that Prof. Murray writes—qualities that are not accentuated by the mouthings of the protagonist, Mr. Martin Harvey, the uninspired drone of the chorus, or the intermittent shrieking and bawling of the crowd. In the translation of the Professor the simple profundities of the poet become delicate verse, which ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... now began to present itself to the Japanese people, not merely as a vehicle for securing insensibility to suffering in this life and happiness in the next, but also as a great protagonist of refined progress, gorgeous in paraphernalia, impressive in rites, eminently practical in teachings, and substituting a vivid rainbow of positive hope for the negative pallor of Shinto. Men began to adopt the stole; women to take the veil, and people to visit the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... suffrage in the West to form a balance of power with which to carry out this policy. She did not live to turn this power upon an unwilling Congress. But she stood to the last, despite this temporary change of program, the great dramatic protagonist of national freedom for women and its achievement ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... the inspired thought of inviting Moffatt to meet Clare Van Degen, Mrs. Fairford and Charles Bowen. It had occurred to her that the simplest way of explaining Moffatt was to tell Ralph that she had unexpectedly discovered an old Apex acquaintance in the protagonist of the great Ararat Trust fight. Moffatt's defeat had not wholly divested him of interest. As a factor in affairs he no longer inspired apprehension, but as the man who had dared to defy Harmon B. Driscoll he was a conspicuous and, to some ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... historical fiction persist in that dangerous practice of leaving an angry and overmastered villain bound to a tree to await death or rescue? The result is rescue every time, and one way and another a mort of trouble for the good characters. Still it may be argued that if the protagonist of The Fortunes of Garin (CONSTABLE) had not followed this risky precedent those fortunes would not have led him where they eventually did, and we should have missed one of the best costume novels of the year. Miss MARY JOHNSTON is among the very few waiters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... will live forever as a symbolic figure, representative of certain indigenous qualities in American life. Lowell found in Leather-Stocking "the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths as Arthur in his to his mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry." ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the influence of a long tradition. The young man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels, while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark him out as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he was soon to become. M. Bourget did not then speak English, and my French conversation, which had been wholly learned from books, had a way at that time—and, alack! has still—of breaking down under me, just as ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tribes of Britain; a polyandry in which the husbands were father and sons (De Bello Gallico, V, xiv). These people were probably pre-Celtic, and this strengthens the arguments already put forward for a pre-Celtic origin for the Protagonist of our narrative. ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... evident to me that music is wrong before a play or during intermissions. But it is necessary until our dramatists provide some other prelude. That prelude must be a beautiful setting of silence for a few moments showing the protagonist under the light of eternity. In the beginning all words contained a spiritual "import,"—were angels. At Babel many fell. Now all our spiritual words are material words grown out of their meanings. When ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... of X——;" whereat the reader, uneasily conscious of never having heard of him, inclines to condemn the whole business beforehand as an impossible fable. I fancy Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM felt something of this difficulty with regard to the protagonist of his quaintly-called The Moon and Sixpence (HEINEMANN), since, for all his sly pretence of quoting imaginary authorities, we have really only his unsupported word for the superlative genius of Charles Strickland, the stockbroker ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... younger farm-servant; and Mayne, known as Leather, who is a convict whose good behaviour so far has meant that he can be trusted to work on a farm. There are also Mrs Braydon, and Nic's two sisters, Nic being the protagonist of the story. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... in Sheffield, an enormous crowd had assembled outside the Town Hall. Inside the court an anxious and expectant audiience{sic}, among them Mrs. Dyson, in the words of a contemporary reporter, "stylish and cheerful," awaited the appearance of the protagonist. Great was the disappointment and eager the excitement when the stipendiary came into the court about a quarter past ten and stated that Peace had attempted to escape that morning on the journey from London to Sheffield, and that ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... often become very elaborate and contain even sub-plots, counter-plots, and added complications of all sorts. But the basis is the same, and always in some form struggle pervades the drama; always this struggle ranges the subordinate characters for or against protagonist and antagonist, and the outcome is vitally part and substance of all that goes before—the end was sown when the seeds of the beginning were planted. This ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... an equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined through the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... moment of extreme crisis in the fortunes of the treaty its chief protagonist was removed from the scene of action and the Democratic forces fighting for ratification were deprived of effective leadership. Had there been a real leader in the Senate who could carry on the fight with vigor and finesse, the treaty might even then have been saved; but Wilson's system had ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... a great appreciation, and Mr Cruickshank, following, spoke in complimentary terms of the eloquent appeal made by the "young and vigorous protagonist" of the imperial cause, but proceeded to a number of quite other and apparently more important grounds why he should be elected. The Hon. Mr Tellier's speech—the Minister was always kept to the last—was a defence of the recent dramatic development of the Government's ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... that, to the singer, no question of ethics was implied. Nothing common, nothing of this human daily world, inheres in it; but sacrosanct destinies were involved, and the martialed might of the Invisible. It was part of a tremendous drama, in which Omnipotence itself was protagonist. Little Israel rose against the mighty of this world; but the Unseen is mightier than the mighty; and the Unseen was with little Israel. The application is false, unethical, abominable—as coming through brain-minds of that kind. But you must go back behind the application, behind the brain-mind, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... agitation increased. It was a matter of intense surprise that our good friends from Kilkeel seemed to have forgotten their grievance; and a still greater surprise that their foreman and self-constituted protagonist could deprive himself of the intense pleasure of writing eloquent objurgations to the priest. But not one word was heard from them; and when, in the commencement of the autumn, Father Letheby received a letter from the Board of Works, stating that the Inspector of the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... thinking more of the poetry of the theme than of his hero's character. Romeo is crude and immature when compared with a profound psychological study like Hamlet. In "Hamlet" the action often stands still while incidents are invented for the mere purpose of displaying the peculiarities of the protagonist. "Hamlet," too, is the longest of Shakespeare's plays with the exception of "Antony and Cleopatra," and "the total length of Hamlet's speeches," says Dryasdust, "far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... lives. And that world conquers largely because he cannot be united to the woman who is his inspiration and his strength. In handling this fable two difficult questions were to be answered by the craftsman: by what means does the hostile environment crush the protagonist? Why cannot he take the saving hand that is held out to him? Ibsen practically shirks the answer to the first question. For it is not the bitter zealot Kroll, despite his newspaper war and his scandal-mongering, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Marduk to be present. We next find Anshar in converse with the god Marduk, who offers to act as the champion of the gods and to fight Timat and her allies. Marduk being a form of the Sun-god, the greatest of all the powers of light, thus becomes naturally the protagonist of the gods, and the adversary of Timat and her powers of darkness. Then Anshar summoned a great council of the gods, who forthwith met in a place called "Upshukkinaku", which may be described as the Babylonian Olympus. It was all-important for Marduk to appear at the council of ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... observe, "with the sensational triumph achieved by the work of X——;" whereat the reader, uneasily conscious of never having heard of him, inclines to condemn the whole business beforehand as an impossible fable. I fancy Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM felt something of this difficulty with regard to the protagonist of his quaintly-called The Moon and Sixpence (HEINEMANN), since, for all his sly pretence of quoting imaginary authorities, we have really only his unsupported word for the superlative genius of Charles Strickland, the stockbroker who abandoned respectable London ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... "tame" aborigines; old Samson, full of wisdom; Brookes, a younger farm-servant; and Mayne, known as Leather, who is a convict whose good behaviour so far has meant that he can be trusted to work on a farm. There are also Mrs Braydon, and Nic's two sisters, Nic being the protagonist of ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... it was little of an event; the play passed almost unnoticed. A noisy reception, indeed, would have been no fitting tribute to its solemn beauty. All Racine's religious feeling, all his domestic tenderness are united in Athalie with his matured feeling for Greek art. The great protagonist is the Divine Being; Providence replaces the fate of the ancient drama. A child (for Racine was still an innovator in the French theatre) was the centre of the action; the interests were political, or rather national, in the highest sense; the events were, as formerly, the developments ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... palliation of Lorenzo's failure in the temper of his times. There was enough daring left in Florence to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... honor of Milton, and one of his chief claims on our gratitude, that he is the first great protagonist in Christendom of the doctrine that marriage is a private matter, and that, therefore, it should be freely dissoluble by mutual consent, or even at the desire of one of the parties. We owe to him, says Howard, "the boldest defence of the liberty of divorce which had yet appeared. If ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... aristocratic instincts—no proletarian is quite so thorough a revolutionist as the born aristocrat, witness Nietzsche—and Chopin, in the bloodless battle of the Romantics, in the silent warring of Slav against Teuton, Gaul and Anglo-Saxon, will ever stand as the protagonist ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... man, like Lingard and Willem—are brought together in direct and tragic conflict. At such moments as these we get that true authentic thrill of immemorial romance—romance as old as the first stories ever told or sung—of the encounter of protagonist and antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and terrible and strong, the austere ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... criticism is that it has no hero. But if this be a fault, it is one which it shares with the Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost. As Satan has been called the hero of the latter poem, so Caesar, if not the hero, is the protagonist of the Pharsalia. But Cato, Pompey, and the senate as a body, have all competed for this honour. The fact is this: that while the primitive epic is altogether personal, the poem whose interest is national or human cannot always find a single hero. It is after ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... vainly sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either at home or abroad, with that ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
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