Commonplace Book

'It was a countryman's letter, ill-spelt, involved, and of a character to give Algernon a fine scholarly sense of superiority altogether novel. Everybody abused Algernon for his abuse of common Queen's English in his epistles: but here was a letter in comparison with which his own were doctorial, and accordingly he fell upon it with an acrimonious rapture of pedantry known to dull wits that have by extraordinary hazard pounced on a duller.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXVII)

Commonplace Book

'It became a question with him now, whether Wit and Ambition may dwell together harmoniously in a young man: whether they will not give such manifestation of their social habits as two robins shut in a cage will do: of which pretty birds one will presently be discovered with a slightly ruffled bosom amid the feathers of his defunct associate.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXVI)

Commonplace Book

'...From his very first intercourse with men he had felt, and then had seen, himself repulsed, branded, despised. Human speech had never been to him aught but mockery and curses. As he grew up, he had found around him nothing but hatred. What wonder that he should have caught it! He had contracted it - he had but picked up the weapon that had wounded him.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 18)

The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (1960)

This autobiography of the author's earlier years confirms what I'd already felt about him, something which he also admits in a tangential way: he is a mixed phenomenon. He calls it 'the divided mind', which is a too-easy seeing of both sides which can amount to indecisiveness, or, presumably, to a fatal energy-slide in terms of the primary pointedness of his work. I see it more in terms of being really quite enamoured of his self-pricking honesty in discussing the pressures in his life and poetry, quickly followed by a slipping-sliding of confidence as he takes an angle which seems too superficial, or as he seems to covert himself away in a too-comfy turn of phrase. I'm not sure whether this was intended to be his only autobiographical work. It turned out so. We have much more of him as a child and young man in the period leading up to the Second World War; his life beyond that is sketchy in the extreme - the story was to be filled in by his son, Sean, in his admirable insider's biography from 1980. This book is marked with passages of great insight, alongside lesser stretches.

Commonplace Book

'...everyone, through the inner monologue that is his reflective commentary on experience, selects and subtly distorts the facts so as to make him more interesting or more tolerable to himself, in doing so he creates a personal mythology which, because it modifies him, does become representative truth. Such modifications to the basic model built by one's genes and early environment are no doubt extremely limited. The individual cannot be re-made. But he is not, I believe, condemned to an unalterable pattern: there remains a certain "play" within the microcosm, as there is within the laws of the physical universe: inner and outer necessity, bearing upon a man now at this point, now at that, may call forth latent characteristics, or relegate dominant ones to comparative inactivity, so that the balance of his powers and preoccupations is changed a little. Time and again, he "reverts to pattern"; but the pattern is not precisely the same after each shake-up.'

from The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (Postscript)

Commonplace Book

'Silence is commonly the slow poison used by those who mean to murder love. There is nothing violent about it; no shock is given; Hope is not abruptly strangled, but merely dreams of evil, and fights with gradually stifling shadows. When the last convulsions come they are not terrific; the frame has been weakened for dissolution; love dies like natural decay...'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'...That magnificent art which the Vandals had produced, the academies have murdered. To the work of centuries and of revolutions, which, at least, devastate with impartiality and grandeur, has been added that cloud of school-trained architects licensed, privileged and patented, degrading with all the discernment and selection of bad taste - substituting the gingerbread-work of Louis XV for the Gothic tracery, to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. 'Tis the old oak, in the last stage of decay, stung and gnawed by caterpillars.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 14)

Commonplace Book

'Major Stafford was, as I have already hinted, of high unblemished lineage; but Fortune, in bestowing this mark of her good-will upon him, had exhausted all her favours, and denied him that portion of the good things of this world so necessary to secure to rank the respect it claims. He was what is commonly called "a soldier of fortune," that is to say, a soldier of no fortune, - but John Bull is peculiarly felicitous in misnomers of this kind. The man who demands payment under a threat of arrest he terms a "Solicitor," names a cinder-heap in the suburbs "Mount Pleasant," and calls a well-known piece of water the "Serpentine River," because it is not a river, and because it is not serpentine.'

from Some Account of My Cousin Nicholas by Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Barham) (Volume I, Chapter I)

Christine by Alice Cholmondeley (1917)

Alice Cholmondeley is the pseudonym of 'Elizabeth' of German Garden fame, now known as Elizabeth von Arnim. There had been quite a hiatus between her previous novel and this one. That novel had seemed almost like a final statement of the theme that had made her famous; young English woman journeys to north-eastern Germany to marry a titled German, and discovers herself in the process, as well as revealing the extraordinary differences between the two cultures, almost invariably to Germany's disadvantage, using humour edged with savage wit. She returns to Germany as a subject in this, but of course all pre-war "sweetening" is gone. Christine is a young ingenue who has travelled to Berlin to follow her musical studies - she is a prodigious violinist. The novel is built of her letters back to her mother in England. There are only the two of them, her father is dead, so their attachment is significant. The time of Christine's travel to Berlin is an important one, though she doesn't know it to begin with; it is the summer of 1914. As she grows accustomed to her new studying life there, she reveals in letters home what can be regarded as the usual 'Elizabeth' subject matter: how silly and pompous and ludicrous the Germans are. But this period marks itself as the weeks go along by the souring which occurs. Conversations become focussed around the Servian duke who has been assassinated and around the friends and enemies of Germany in the ensuing jockeying for points. These ludicrous Germans begin to reveal a more sinister import; their faces become redder, conversations become more strangulated, the tension rises. In the midst of this Christine has been taken up by a Junker family, going on summer break with them, and also falling head over heels for a young soldier friend of theirs. Finally war breaks out, the English come in on the 'wrong' side, and Christine is very quickly persona non grata. She makes her escape using trains toward Switzerland where her mother is staying. The original pseudonymous publication of this, with an introduction by 'Cholmondeley' posing as a grief-stricken mother, which included the information that Christine never made it alive out of Germany, was intended I think as an attempt at 'literary faking' and meant to be understood, initially, as genuine. It was certainly taken as such in some quarters, though the slightly obvious and plotted quality should have rung alarm bells. It has charm, and brightness, but feels a little like a return to overfamiliar territory. It's a good thing that this territory is still entertaining, and mapped by as fine a writer.

Commonplace Book

'...I have seen enough examples of this egotism in parents who, themselves emotionally or morally immature, vent their own insecurity upon their children in sulks or rages or less unsubtle manifestations of the craving for power, to feel amazed that the young ever emerge unwarped from the family circle which too often, beneath its surface, is a vicious one.'

from The Buried Day by C. Day Lewis (Part Two, Chapter 7)

Commonplace Book

'The farmer dropped into his fireside chair, dumb and spiritless. A shadow was over the house, and the inhabitants moved about their domestic occupations silent as things that feel the thunder-cloud. Before sunset Robert was gone on his long walk to the station, and Rhoda felt a woman's great envy of the liberty of a man, who has not, if it pleases him not, to sit and eat grief among familiar images, in a home that furnishes its altar-flame.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XV)