The Pastor's Wife by 'Elizabeth' (1914)

The biggest surprise must have been this book's size, to the author's fans, when it was first published. A good third bigger than her longest book to date, the main question must have been whether the author's wit could stand, extended to 500 pages. And, as they read, they must have been deeply gratified - it undoubtedly could. In many ways, this is her 'standard' story: young Englishwoman, rather green, goes romantically to live with new German husband on the piny plains of Pomerania, and gets an education in what a variety of experience she hasn't yet sampled. But what 'Elizabeth' manages to do this time is to focus our attention on the woman rather more thoroughly than her erring man. And, as predicated by the length, she takes it slowly, savouring many of the perhaps painful and emotional lessons Ingeborg has to learn with gentle wit that has a concomitant swift stab to it. That deepens the picture. This definitely has a more gentle slope to its topography than The Caravaners, its predecessor, which was rapier-like and a truly grand example of comedy. I wonder whether the death of Henning von Arnim, her husband, in 1910, caused a reflective reflex in the author, where she wanted, for the last time, to visit the theme that had made her famous, to make a final statement upon it. Whatever, this gently humorous novel is a joy comprised of one part sympathy and two parts schadenfreude; Ingeborg's daffy, stumbling realisations of the harsh realities of life form a counterpoint to a vision of compromised content in her life with a very faulty husband. A cynical outlook at its base perhaps, but likely a true one, and transformed by the author's talent.

Commonplace Book

'...Suffering was nothing, bought nothing, brought no compensation, it was a byproduct, and even when it destroyed it was of no account in the logic of event. The people would not be purged or saved by suffering, they would only be selected, freed of the weak and the irresolute, reduced at last to a sticking point. For those who died, for those who despaired, for those who suffered too much and were destroyed in their heart or courage by it, there was no redress. No future could give them back what they had lost. They and their pain would be as meaningless as grains of dust...'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Commonplace Book

'...No ridicule knocks the strength out of us so thoroughly as our own.'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XV)

The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman (1904)

The now-forgotten Carman is a New World variant of the 90s aesthete. The key difference seems to be a sense of Arts and Crafts washing through the high language. I can imagine him togged in 'artistic' clothing wandering windswept Canadian beaches, taking in the implications on Art, and his art, that Nature inspired. Not at all a dandified, tailed aesthete of the London type. But many of his preoccupations in these thirty-two essays are those we might expect. Beauty rules supreme, and casts her spells through the seasons, writing, and personal philosophy. There is a strange two-speed quality here, too, though. Some essays are pointed, clear, resounding searchings. Others are a little lost in their own verbiage, or in half-ideas. Apparently he lived in a menage-a-trois with a couple and dabbled in early examples of mind-body-spirit alternative philosophies, but there is no sense of revolution in this work, just an endearing dedication to simple principles. I've not yet read his poetry, which was apparently the crowning achievement of his career. As an example of the art of essay-writing, this is a flawed and yet engaging pleasure.

Commonplace Book

'...he must enlist the sympathetic help of words by using them kindly and rightly according to their nature and genius, and as they belong, and not antagonize them by misapplication. I have known writers who established a reputation for great cleverness simply by the misuse of words. Their style was called original. It was. For pure unmitigated cruelty to our tiny, long-suffering servants, these patient words, it was unmatched. Now a man who will mutilate his mother tongue merely to display his own agility is no better than a heathen. It is so needless, too. For to the generous and sedulous master, what revelations of undreamed beauty, what marvels of import, will not words impart?'

from Atmosphere, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Commonplace Book

'...No sentiment, only a sharp pain, a pain incredibly naked and real. In the last conscious second of the fatal spin, in the moment when the flames covered him or the hot bullet got him, or when his nerve broke like an over-strained rope, parting strand by strand, the pilot's brain clicked, "This is it." Always that flash of recognition, the knowledge that the thing long awaited had come. The spirit can be shorn away by a thought sharper than a bayonet. The one sure thing was that the moment would come, death within death, the moment before the crash. It wasn't the crash you thought of, but the split second when you saw it leap at you, the echo before the event. It came, it always came, one way or another. Either you stuck it and went out on mission after mission till you were killed. Or you didn't stick it and the mainspring broke. Whichever way it was, your fate stood beside you like a visible presence. The Bridegroom. The Master of the House.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Commonplace Book

'...An unflinching observance of duty, unmodified by any other idea, by mercy, by love, by gentleness, by generosity, might readily lead to almost inhuman hardness. The devotee of duty may become an unlovely and pestiferous monomaniac, a burden to himself and an infliction to others. We all know how angular and sour and uncomfortable a fanatic can be. It matters not whether he is a religious fanatic or a free-thinker, his inordinate devotion to his one conception of life is a nuisance. He is so stiff-necked that he cannot see anything outside of his own pasture. The beautiful plasticity of human nature at its best seems to have been left out of him.'

from The Debauchery of Mood, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman