Commonplace Book

'"When a wise man makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'...I really shall be disappointed if I go through life without once being properly in love. As a writer, I feel it my duty to my work - but they are all so helpless, and such children. How can one feel thrilled?'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 22nd 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'Patriotism - love of country. How excellent an emotion - not, I think, a virtue, except in so far as any strong feeling has more strength, more virtue in it than tepidity. When we speak of it as a proper and decor[o]us sentiment towards the State, we wrong it, as a man wrongs a woman whom he loves merely because she is his wife. The love of country is a feeling for the countryside - its hills and villages and race of men. It is a thing wholly individual and un-moral, as the love for another person is individual. To confuse this love of country and race for an adulation of the State lies at the bottom of much pain and confusion - of sentimentality and positive danger, too, I think. To raise it into a civic virtue, to clothe it with pomp of armies and banners, to stain it with blood and to slay before it as before an unholy altar sacrifices of gold and of men and of men's liberty - this is not patriotism any more than the lust of a senator who lays before his mistress the spoils of a state and of his rivals in love.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 10th 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'...She was not in love, she had sought love so often, so eagerly, and so futilely that her capacity for it was long ago exhausted. Instead her mind was invaded by a sentiment to which she wholly surrendered herself. Around it she twisted all the imaginative garlands of which she was capable. These dreams were more to her than actuality could have been, for in them all was arranged to her liking, they far overtopped any possible reality, and left tasteless and unwished for the friendships or even love that she still might have had. She had never known summer; so must suffer again and again these false spring-times, these long moments of counterfeit enchantment, secretly feeding herself on miracles...'

from The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Book Two, Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'Perhaps love played his tune so well because their natures had unblunted edges, and were keen for bliss, confiding in it as natural food. To gentlemen and ladies he fine-draws upon the void, ravishingly; or blows into the mellow bassoon; or rouses the heroic ardours of the trumpet; or, it may be, commands the whole Orchestra for them. And they are pleased. He is still the cunning musician. They languish, and taste ecstasy: but it is, however sonorous, an earthly concert. For them the spheres move not to two notes. They have lost, or forfeited and never known, the first supersensual spring of the ripe senses into passion; when they carry the soul with them, and have the privileges of spirits to walk disembodied, boundlessly to feel. Or one has it, and the other is a dead body. Ambrosia let them eat, and drink the nectar: here sit a couple to whom Love's simple bread and water is a finer feast.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XIX)

Commonplace Book

'...He belonged to the unlucky order of persons who possess the temperament of genius without possessing any sufficient practical talent to act as safety-valve and carry off the alarming rush of steam genius is continually in the process of generating. Such persons are worthy of all commiseration. In the abstract one regards them with the tenderest pity. In the concrete one too frequently finds them insupportable.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book V, Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'But here, in this grey city, there is all the sorrow and dignity of a conquered people. Never believe any one when they tell you that it is more dignified to win than to be defeated. It isn't true. Here in the streets, lit no more brightly than London during war-time, English Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices "No Germans allowed." The money for their food is all paid from the German taxes, and the German children crowd round their bright lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have seen...'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', October 6th 1924 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'It is most disheartening for those of us who try so hard to be good yet attractive to see how easy it is for rogues to make their effect. We good mild persons who powder our noses and pin our hopes to marriage with a docile breadwinner - we are inheriting and devastating the earth. We have invented Disarmament and Prohibition and the Girl Guide Movement and Higher Thought - and lo! one splendid lie, one fantastic coxcomb, can make us all look fools!'

from The States Again - I, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'Young women in the West simper to match the men's swagger. Sombreroed beauties who ride gloriously from one adventure to another have never been seen by me in the Western States - indeed, I know no Western girls who can sit a horse at all. As far as I have seen the young generation of Western charmers, they seem to be exclusively indoor. Pioneering was mother's job. With rouge, rolled silk stockings, near-silk jumpers, hobble-skirts and silly pretty little city toques, they outrage the enormous desert skies; on high French heels they totter along remote boardwalks; with servile squeakings and gigglings and nudgings they ensnare the simple cowboy hearts that we have believed that only the free, the untamed, the primeval, the trick-equestrienne female - (like us in our movie mood) - could ever charm or deserve. Here are mincing suburban morals, small-town graces, city smirks and wiles, seducing our interesting rogues....'

from The States Again - I, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'There are several highways across the North American continent, and this fact alone fools travellers. Highway is a word with an easy and comfortable sound to the ears of all but those who have already motored across the States. Actually the use of the word in this connection is an act of faith, and very beautiful. It means that some day Ford-errants, or their successors, will be able to run singing, without changing gears, on a road like a taut wire stretched from the sunrise to the sunset. Let us not dwell on the disappointing fact that, by that time, all the trans-continental fools will be inefficiently using aeroplanes, and the only improvement will be that they will fall into air-pockets instead of bog-holes, and so end their folly and their difficulties once and for all. At present, however, the winter highway is inadequate as a way and can hardly be called high...'

from The States Again - I, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'Ignorance is the impetus that pushes all travellers from their starting-points. We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back.'

from The States Again - I, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'"If one could only stop the machinery for an hour or two," he said to himself, "and get a rest - expunge thought and feeling, put out one's eyes, shut one's ears, sit dumb, blind, solitary in the void - if there is a void. But that's just the intolerable wear and tear of it: there is no void, no space of silence and quiet. Everywhere energy, force, drive. Everywhere a crowd, a hideous jostling crowd of things struggling to be born, struggling to make themselves heard and felt, struggling to push something else aside so as to make their word, their want, their meaning known. And all to no purpose. Their word is emptiness, their want fruitless, their meaning nil. For the circle is never broken: nothing, nobody, can eve[n]r break out of it and be free. The great millstones turn and turn on themselves eternally, grinding down each generation - man, beast, all living things alike - into food for the coming generations, which in due time will be ground down too. If one could only remember that, be passive, be careless, refuse to expect, refuse to fight. But then comes in the infernal malice of the whole conception. Good care has been taken to make us so that we must expect, must fight. For the sake of keeping the gigantic farce in full play, we are tricked with an innate conviction of our own power, freedom, personality - tricked by the flattering conceit that it is not only possible but incumbent upon us to act, and create, and believe, and find out."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'..The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked at the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territory, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall's thundering white, amid the breath and the beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XIV)

Commonplace Book

'Perhaps the inherent force of a nature is shown even more in its passive and negative than in its active and positive self-expressions. In its power of voluntarily limiting its own horizon; of setting itself arbitrary boundaries; of saying, "Thus far will I go, see, admit, and no further." For it takes a lot of latent strength to sit, either mentally or physically, really still. Not to fidget. To "stay put," in short.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'The wind that bowed the old elms, and shivered the dead leaves in the air, had a voice and a meaning for the baronet during that half-hour's lonely pacing up and down under the darkness, awaiting his boy's return. The solemn gladness of his heart gave nature a tongue. Through the desolation flying overhead - the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across the bare-swept land - he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order of the universe, from a heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as manifested in the dear child who had just left him; confirmed in its belief in the ultimate victory of good within us, without which nature has neither music nor meaning, and is rock, stone, tree, and nothing more.

In the dark, the dead leaves beating on his face, he had a word for his note-book: "There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness: from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom, whence we see that this world is well designed."'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter X)

Commonplace Book

'This description of poverty is addicted to moving. It frequently changes its address. It lies abed late of a morning, and only regains a sense of security and freedom after dark. It is almost invariably in debt and in a persistent state of anxiety as to ways and means. It seldom enters a place of worship, though it contrives to show a gay face and smart garment in the music-hall or gallery of the theatre. It is generally vulgar, mean, tawdry, sensual, improvident, disreputable, incorrigible - often clever, witty, kindly, unselfish, as well. And it is always pathetic - pathetic with the desolating pathos of things mistaken and gone astray; of things by nature glad and pleasant, but through accident or wilful mis-use grown soiled and dirty; of things born with a curse of inadequacy and futility upon them - dancing, as vessels dance, all the more merrily over the waves for lack of the ballast, that, while it would make their course a slower and more laborious one, would save them from foundering at last.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter I)

Commonplace Book

'Women come to India, I understand, either because they are married to empire builders or because they want to be. They are expected to learn to play bridge well, to dance well in the manner of about two years ago, and to know what to wear at the races. To take an interest in India is, on the other hand, most unladylike. A nice woman may go so far as to say sometimes, "My dear, I'm simply terrified of these fiendish revolutionaries and things, I sometimes think they'd like to blow us all up in our beds." A kind of imperial district visiting is also permitted and one may hear a Perfect Lady talk about "My little Thursday Ranees", to whom she teaches leather-work and basket-making. But to find a woman going farther than this, or to hear her admit that she has come to India to see India, will make any well-brought-up empire builder blush. The younger he is, the pinker he blushes.'

from India - II, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'...She hadn't any vulgar longing for story or plot, natural patterns were enough with their inconsequent significance, their broken cadences and unplanned twists of irony. Life directed, edited, and shaped gave her less satisfaction, not more. It was second-hand; this was first-hand, quite genuine raw material, as potentially interesting as murder, rape and arson. [...] They fascinated her as the water, moving by the ship's side, always changing, always the same, fascinated her. This had been a typical day at sea. Its very normality was a sort of curiosity, an inverted stimulus. Its very fragmentariness stirred in her the wish to mould it to some literary ends. Each of these people placed a thread in her hand; if she followed it into her own mind she could walk the mazes of their lives. She felt that power in her. Why shouldn't she shape something out of the little chaos about her? These thoughts were not hard and clear; rather were they a sensuous mental drifting, a state of mind, peaceful but fertile, created in her by the rhythm of the ship...'

from The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Book One, Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'"Marriage is a sort of grave [...] in which, it seems to me, women are called upon to bury a whole lot of precious and delightful possibilities."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...Miss Williamson carried jauntiness to its logical conclusion. She had put on her yachting cap, a sailor blouse with anchors worked on the collar, and a bright and skittish blazer. When she thrust her hands into the pockets it rucked up saucily over her behind. A nautical roll completed the toilet. It was acutely embarrassing to look at her. You felt that she might realise at any moment how she looked and be publicly and painfully ashamed. It was like seeing the Lady Mayoress's bloomers fall off at a civic function, amusing of course, but uncomfortable too.'

from The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Book One, Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'"...Has it never occurred to you what a lovely thing revolution is - La Revolution - she, the person, the spirit, the beast, perhaps - I am not sure which - who wipes off the dust and makes the rusty wheels turn again, and sweeps away dead ideas and brings forth living ones; that persistent enemy of stagnation without whose broom and dustpan human affairs would be smothered by refuse and cobwebs and eaten out by dry-rot? I don't paint allegorical pictures, you know; but if I were ever deluded enough to attempt one, I would try to put Revolution worthily on canvas, in her blood-red robe, holding a scourge in her hand. She is a divinity much more to my taste than smirking marble Apollos, or even Raffaelesque Madonnas, dressed, parrot-like, in half the colours of the rainbow."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'"Beauty lies far deeper than most people are willing to suppose. It consists in the true relation of things to themselves. Everything natural is beautiful."
[...]
"Every action, expression, aspect, rightly understood, is beautiful in as far as it is spontaneous and according to nature. And by that I don't only mean nature groomed, and rubbed down, and in magnificent condition, like a prize animal at a show. I am not going back to any mythic golden age for my beauty - not to impossible gods and goddesses in marble."

"You acknowledge the antique as the basis of instruction, surely?" gasped Mr Barwell.

"No, not as the basis - most emphatically not as the basis. That is getting hold of quite the wrong end of the stick. Work towards perfection, if you like - if you can - if perfection exists; but to begin with it and work back from it is a self-evident mistake, I should say, contrary to all known laws of development. By setting your students down opposite to those faultless marble impossibilities you create a false standard in their minds. Nature does not come up to that standard; consequently, when you show them Nature, they despise her. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Nature is the good; it is an impiety as well as a stupidity to discredit her by filling your students' minds with dreams of a non-existent better. The very best life model you can get looks defective after the Apollos, and Venuses, and all those other ill-conducted classic divinities whom it is customary to make such free use of in the education of English youth. The final measure must always be Nature. Why not send your students to her at once? Why use lies, in short, as a preface to the truth? And why be afraid to take the truth as a whole? I find Nature is full of imperfection, failure, pain, of irony, and of humour of a very broad literal kind. Well, I accept her unhappy and malign aspects as just as true as her happy and benign ones. After a tremendous struggle we have come to understand, thanks chiefly to Turner and Constable - some of the younger men are beginning already to forget or ignore the lesson, though, I am afraid - that rain and storm and cloud are at least as beautiful as clear sky and sunshine, the elements at war as beautiful as the elements at peace. Well, I want to carry that understanding further and deeper. I want to show that, if intelligently looked at, poverty, disease, sorrow, decay, death, sin - yes, I am not much afraid of the word - are ideally beautiful too, paintable too, intrinsically and enduringly poetic."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'"Don't talk to me about beauty as if it was a thing by itself - a quantity, measurable, ponderable, producible or removable at will," he was saying - "as if it could be laid on, as a cabinetmaker lays on a veneer of precious wood over a plain deal surface; as if it could be bought and sold, taken hold of, carried about; as if you could put your finger on it and say, Here it is; or on the absence of it, and say, Here it is not. That is a horribly gross, carnal conception of it. Beauty is a spirit, and they that worship it must worship it in spirit and in truth - specially in truth, not in shams, and delusions, and pretences, and fashions, and affectations, which are precisely that in which the majority always have worshipped it, and always will worship it, I suppose, human nature being what it is, protest as one may. Beauty is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and yet it is always changing, shifting, showing you a fresh face, revealing itself anew. It is endlessly stable and endlessly fertile. It informs all things, and yet in a sense is nothing. You apprehend it more with your intellect than with your eyes. And that is what English people persistently refuse to understand. They are ruining their stage, as they have already ruined their picture-galleries, by the besotted belief that intellect has nothing to do with it; that beauty - which is only another word for art - begins and ends with an appeal to the eyes. We English plume ourselves on our respectability and decency, on avoiding the quagmire of sensuousness into which other nations fall. Only look at the walls of our exhibitions, look at the mise en scene of our theatres! I declare I believe we are the most sensuous nation on the face of the earth. The appeal is always to the eye, and to what are called the domestic affections. And the domestic affections are the biggest shams out. Legalized sensuousness - that is what the domestic affections amount to if you run them to earth."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'"...the truth is always sad," Colthurst said quite gently. "The great fundamental facts are not only sad - they are almost hideous. That is why nature tries to hide them under leaves and flowers, and glories of colour, and of light and shadow, and why we try to hide them under poetry and art. That is why, taking it at a lower level, we lay out gardens, make fountains play, light up lamps. In a commonplace way even these trivialities help to hide the 'accepted hells beneath', the ugly bases of our life..."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book II, Chapter VI)

Walls and Hedges by J. Redwood Anderson (1919)

This was Anderson's first publication post-war, and I wonder whether he served and what effect that service had. Coming through the familiar tone from his previous volumes is an unexpected repetitiveness and occasional flatness. That said, there are moments in this which soar. The piece entitled Ecstacy is a perfect example of untrammelled exploration of a tender feeling. His word- and indeed phrase-choice in this poem is spectacular, most obviously when read aloud, allowing the discovery and wonder in the poem to really breathe. There is another called Stars which unfurls a similar array of artillery, with words and inherent wonder brilliantly building the sense of the feeling explored together. The other explanation of the flatness sometimes apparent here is of course the effect of modernism and its typifying repetitions - I am hoping he steered clear, because, as exampled here, it doesn't aid his style. Quite whose it did aid is something I'm on the road to finding out - anyone's? Despite its moments of magnificence, this is the first Anderson volume I've read where he looks vulnerable to failing. Perhaps, though, that's a sign of the movement and turmoil required for something really great to come.....

Commonplace Book

'There was war in Szechuan - if you could call it war, for there were no posters about war. No pictures of strapping heroes encouraged those who felt neither strapping nor heroic to find out what tonic war could do for them. In Szechuan war advertised itself; one saw the war and one saw the heroes - which was unfortunate from the point of view of those who deal in war. Even the losers advertised the war. I watched the dead losers go, in procession but not in triumph, face downward in the river, threading their forlorn way through the plaited rapids, pausing indifferently in the quiet reaches where the water enfolded them like gold silk. I saw the less fortunate losers come to seek the protection of the mountains, the wounded slung painfully on poles carried by unfriendly coolies forced into service, or riding on bleeding and dying ponies. The unwounded also carried significant news of the glory of war; their sunken eyes saw nothing, their faces were like crumpled paper, they wavered on their feet. Only those of the vanquished who escaped first were strong enough to revenge themselves upon a cruel world. Like locusts they paused in their passing, and where they paused desolation entered.'

from The Yang-Tse River, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes, not written or formally taught, but intuitively understood by all, and invariably acted upon by the loyal and the true. The race is not nearly civilized, we must remember. Thus, not to follow your leader whithersoever he may think proper to lead; to back out of an expedition because the end of it frowns dubious, and the present fruit of it is discomfort; to quit a comrade on the road, and return home without him: these are the tricks which no boy of spirit would be guilty of, let him come to any description of mortal grief in consequence. Better so than have his own conscience denouncing him sneak. Some boys who behave boldly enough are not troubled by this conscience, and the eyes and the lips of their fellows have to supply the deficiency. They do it with just as haunting, and even more horrible pertinacity, than the inner voice, and the result, if the probation be not very severe and searching, is the same. The leader can rely on the faithfulness of his host: the comrade is sworn to serve.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'Miss Crookenden refused to see what was unlovely, to admit the existence of what was impure. If she needs must touch pitch, she would whitewash her pitch first, believing thereby to escape defilement. Many of the sweetest and noblest women go through life practising these pious frauds upon themselves. It is impossible not to honour them. Yet fraud, even of this high-minded description, remains fraud still, and brings its inevitable punishment along with it.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book II, Chapter IV)

Drift by James Hanley (1930)

This is at once an amazing and a confounding book. Its picture of a young Catholic man and his fight with ideas of God, religion and duty both inherited and wished for is at its best astonishing. The visceral depth of the portrait rolls in poetic pulses through a landscape of the mind beautifully captured. This internal struggle is set within a richly rounded external scene, made up of the lilts and customs of the Irish in Liverpool in the 1920s; the hypocritical deceits and religious time-serving, the hints of sensuality under the iron hand of uprightness, the emotional pull of surviving on nothing, as well as physical hunger and want. Joe Rourke is part of all of this, and yet yearning for more in what seems an alternatingly knowing and then ignorant way. There are also, though, disturbances of this strong mixture; times when it seems Hanley has become almost unhinged - he'll drift off into a peculiar meditation on some seemingly unimportant or odd issue, or surprise the reader with a reference which is deranged or, if not, at least utterly disconnected. I don't think that these are fully intentional, but rather the effluvia of a notion that this needed to be written at high heat and left to roll its own course. A self-indulgence (which occurs a little too often) I'm tempted to forgive as the results are otherwise brilliant.

Mother of Pearl by Anatole France (1892)

This is France-as-antiquarian at another high point. The first group of stories deal with the times surrounding first of all the birth of Christ and secondly middle ages developments in sainthood. Here his voice is sometimes folkloric and always playful and often redolent of "the real thing". The second, and larger, group are stories in the byways of the French Revolution, with portraits of minor aristocrats, their adherents and tormentors tussling in harsh and uncertain conditions which bred deception and secrecy. Each piece is not so interested in narrative fullness so much as the sketch-like capturing of moments in time. They can feel a little unended and unfinished as a result. France's tone is his own alone; there is no mistaking him, and there is a claim to originality in that. I think the reason that his popularity has dimmed from its original dizzy heights is that he is not a sensualist - heavy atmosphere and rich description are not his stock. Rather it is a light touch on people and their situations, examined with wise amusement and a wry sentimentality which occasionally descends to a deeper pathos. This mixture, combined with what would now be seen as esoteric subject matter, consign him to unpopularity. I too find it unaffecting but there is no doubt that the clear air of it is refreshing and shouldn't be underestimated.