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)