'He had better not come my way,' he thought. The mongrel represented---! But what did Prosper Profond represent? Nothing that mattered surely. And yet something real enough in the world--unmorality let off its chain, disillusionment on the prowl! That expression Annette had caught from him: "Je m'en fiche! "A fatalistic chap! A continental--a cosmopolitan--a product of the age!英文原著 · 《Awakening & To Let》
What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic clinging to the tradition of the Eden- garden, its careless and vigorous boyhood, its meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless expiatory ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of salvation, and finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the world- slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!英文原著 · 《Pagan and Christian Creeds》
But in the disillusionment of beauty and of love there is an older tone. With what bitter savor, with what grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements in his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms. A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merely that beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their going they are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference. And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!英文原著 · 《Poems of Rupert Brooke》
"You have disgusted me with life and passion for a long time to come. Leaving monstrosities aside, are not all human sentiments dissolved thus, by ghastly disillusionment? Children torture mothers by their bad conduct, or their lack of affection. Wives are betrayed. Mistresses are cast aside, abandoned. Talk of friendship! Is there such a thing! I would turn pious to-morrow if I did not know that I can remain like the inaccessible summit of a cliff amid the tempests of life.英文原著 · 《Sarrasine》
Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate creation. He knew that these were the voices of "our feathered songsters," that this was "a joyous chorus" greeting the day. He knew that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join with them by reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and the voice of a schoolmaster:英文原著 · 《Soul of a Bishop》