Commonplace Book

'"...Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting: it warms it, but not to fever. I like to taste leisurely of bliss: devoured in haste, I do not know its flavour."'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Twenty-Eight)

Commonplace Book

'The hotel was, certainly, unlike other hotels; but it is useless to pretend that the eastern wave of luxury, which was now spending itself in London, had as yet broken over the interior of this, one of the first built hotels in England. Encaustic tiles make it echo, red flock papers make it dark. The rooms are too large, too well designed. With floating palm trees and ferns in them, they have, more than ever, the air of an empty aquarium waiting for new, half-human, half-marine specimens until even the round ottomans in the centre of the floor become so many closed-up red anemones on the tank bottom, the sofas and chairs loose rocks. Move these, and from under will crawl sideways some crustacean and armoured spinster, or a purple-faced monster of an old oceanic Colonel. When, however, the observer looks more closely, the greenery is too arid to justify such imagery; the leaves of palm and aspidistra are hard and withered, scratch the wall at any draught. Indeed the palm trees lumbering up in the corners of the rooms are so tall, their outspread fingers so bony, that they resemble rather the reconstructed extinct monsters at a Natural History Museum than anything in an aquarium.'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'...Once more he could hear the peculiar leafy rustle made by the silken flounces of the crinolines, as they rippled caressingly past, while patchouli floated to him over the shrill east wind, whose shrieking he could not hear, whose sting he could hardly feel. Once more in his empty conch sounded the langorous lilt, beating up into a furious storm, of the Hungarian band, in their slung jackets and gaudy frogged uniforms. Or, he was back in the fabulous spring days of his youth, when May burnt with a steady green flame now unknown, and, as though the honeyed west wind had lifted suddenly a curtain, every tree was revealed weighed down by blossom, from the formal, pointed flambeaux of the chestnuts to the gold-flecked white foam of the fruit trees, to the hedge of hawthorns that were, at these moments, avenues of white-winged ships in full sail across a green ocean...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'...For from this novel, disturbing sensation was being born slowly, painfully, another emotion, jealousy: and Miss Bramley was frigid in manner to anyone who displayed a tendency to become intimate with the old lady. Even upon the casual acquaintance of a hotel - upon that pathetic over-dressed proportion of England's surplus middle-aged females, which in the short span between sunrise and sunset, birth and death, finds an assurance of eternity in the involute inanities of a conversation carried on among itself, and thus lives by taking in its own spiritual washing or, occasionally, washing its own dirty linen - Miss Bramley turned a severe and then a threatening eye...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...I had imagined Bilbao was a place full of lovely sailors and ships, but in case any misguided person should in future console themselves during a night journey from Madrid with equally Castilian imaginings, I will here record in cold ink that of all ports on God's earth it is the vilest. Even the Spaniards are debased, and so hideous that I believe they must really be French. They all wear the most stupid clothes and are rude and ungracious. The town is unredeemed by a single building which one could call architecture. In short it is very like what one conceives a south American port run up in 2 weeks by a cinema firm would be...'

from a letter to Lytton Strachey, dated April 18, 1919, in Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries by Dora Carrington

The Man from America by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (1905)

This is Pasture-lite. The author's initially established mode was to present a typically late nineteenth century tableau of marriage and money, leaven it with a large cast and comedy, and then add some moral depth for gravitas. In her previous novel she began to alter the mixture with a reduced cast and comedy and more moral depth. In this one she has switched the emphases again; the moral depth is much less evident. It starts with an aged Irish-French Vicomte de Nauroy established at one edge of Pasture's favourite location, in this instance the Devon-Somerset borders. An idyllic valley brimming with green, two great houses and a couple of lesser ones. The Vicomte, quite fat and comfortable and a little distant from worldliness (who could play him in the BBC adaptation? well, yes, only David Suchet) is very relaxed in the manorhouse-cum-cottage Honeycott. We follow his two charges, Rosaleen and Kitty, his granddaughters, through losing their mother, gaining a terrible stepmother, losing their father and their home (one of the two great houses) in favour of the stepmother's daughter. There is brightness and comedy scattered throughout this journey, the story is dappled with sunlight, twisting lanes, kitchen gardens, vast woods, flowers. Also part of the mix are a huge cast of well-to-do locals and some incomers. The 'boys' of the other great house, their nouveau-riche parents, as well as a family of incredibly wealthy Americans, one of the patriarchs of whom was the Vicomte's youthful friend in days of war, and who has acknowledged his debt to the Vicomte by supplying him with business-tips ever since. So, yes, this novel is even more about money than many of Pasture's others, although it's always an important skein. There is only one life challenge to be overcome in this plot, for all the young ones to marry well: that is to say, to marry someone they love, and be very comfortable financially by the way. And needless to say, with much tearing around, and an abundance of comedic come-uppances, all turns out as it should, and previously hidden wealth is put to very good use! I have to reiterate a previous comment: that Pasture is nothing if not a born storyteller; her resounding belief in this tale materially bulwarks its entertainment-value. But this is very 'spangly' - I'd like to see her return to the fine balance of her earlier efforts.

Commonplace Book

'A crash - smash - shiver - stopped their whispers. A simultaneously-hurled volley of stones had saluted the broad front of the mill, with all its windows; and now every pane of every lattice lay in shattered and pounded fragments. A yell followed this demonstration - a rioters' yell - a North-of-England - a Yorkshire - a West-Riding - a West-Riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters' yell. You never heard that sound, perhaps, reader? So much the better for your ears - perhaps for your heart; since, if it rends the air in hate to yourself, or to the men or principles you approve, the interests to which you wish well, Wrath wakens to the cry of Hate: the Lion shakes his mane, and rises to the howl of the Hyena: Caste stands up, ireful, against Caste; and the indignant, wronged spirit of the Middle Rank bears down in zeal and scorn on the famished and furious mass of the Operative Class. It is difficult to be tolerant - difficult to be just - in such moments.'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Nineteen)