Essayists From England

"It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth."

"No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education."

""The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art."

"Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life."

"Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace."

"The influence of friendship upon culture differs from that of love, in that it assumes the basic idiosyncrasies of personal taste to be unalterable. Love, in spite of all rational knowledge to the contrary, is always in the mood of believing in miracles."

"If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven't grown old to much purpose."

"I have been reading of late, most carefully, oh such an exciting mass of Anarchist Literature sent to me by old Emma Goldman who is my Prime Minister & chief Political Philosopher! and every week I get the anarchist paper from Avenue A New York City and also the ‘Bulletin of Information’ from the Anarchists of Barcelona. This latter pamphlet I am carefully keeping; because it is not so much concerned with the war as with their experiment in Catalonia of organizing their life on Anarchist lines and getting rid of all Dictatorship & of the ‘Sovereign State’."

"My answer to the question "Why do we philosophize?" is as follows. We philosophize for the same reason that we move and speak and laugh and eat and love. In other words, we philosophize because man is a philosophical animal.… We may be as sceptical as we please. Our very scepticism is the confession of an implicit philosophy."

"One of the curious psychological facts, in connection with the various ways in which various minds function, is the fact that when in these days we seek to visualize, in some pictorial manner, our ultimate view of life, the images which are called up are geometrical or chemical rather than anthropomorphic. It is probable that even the most rational and logical among us as soon as he begins to philosophize at all is compelled by the necessity of things to form in the mind some vague pictorial representation answering to his conception of the universe. Most minds see the universe of their mental conception as something quite different from the actual stellar universe upon which we all gaze. Even the most purely rational minds who find the universe in "pure thought" are driven against their rational will to visualize this "pure thought" and to give it body and form and shape and movement."

"They are at least proof of the inalienable part played, in the functioning of our complex vision, by sensation as an organ of research. But they have a further interest. They are an illuminating revelation of the inherent character and personal bias of the individual soul who is philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the person projecting this particular image."

"Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life."

"Man is the animal who weeps and laughs — and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back — in a book."

"Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question."

"This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness."

"One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is."

"The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism."

"Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party."

"Few writers who have managed to acquire his reputation can have been so much at the mercy of crude emotion."

"You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women."

"Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age. So did Jack, he told me. You think you can go on all your life being single, I remember he said, but you suddenly find out that you can't."

"I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks."

"Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about."

"Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."

"Where is delight? and what are pleasures now?— Moths that a garment fret. The world is turned memorial, crying, "Thou Shalt not forget!""

"Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee, Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art? Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee, Thou little heart?"

"Breathe slumbrous music round me, sweet and slow, To honied phrases set! Into the land of dreams I long to go. Bid me forget!"

"The volumes prefaced by this slight Memoir deserve a place in every collection of Belles Lettres, and form most agreeable and characteristic illustrations of our manners and our age. They possess what is seldom found in light reading, the charm that comes from bequeathing pleasurable impressions. They are suffused in the sweetness of the author's disposition; they shun all painful views of life, all acerbity in observation, all gall in their gentle sarcasm. Added to this, they contain not a thought, not a line, from which the most anxious parent would guard his child. They may be read with safety by the most simple, and yet they contain enough of truth and character to interest the most reflective. Such works, more than many which aspire to a higher flight, and address themselves to Truth with a ruder and more vigorous courtship, are calculated to enjoy a tranquil popularity, and a favored station amongst the Dead who survive in Books."

"He never wrote up to the full mark of his powers; the fountain never rose to the level of its source. But in our day the professional man of letters is compelled to draw too frequently, and by too small disbursements, upon his capital, to allow large and profitable investments of the stock of mind and idea, with which he commences his career. The number and variety of our periodicals have tended to results which benefit the pecuniary interests of the author, to the prejudice of his substantial fame. ...There is a fatal facility in supplying the wants of the week by the rapid striking off a pleasant article, which interferes with the steady progress, even with the mature conception of an elaborate work"

"It seems to me that, with but slight reserve and modification, we may apply to our departed friend his own pathetic and beautiful elegy upon another."

"No time had he for profound reading, for lengthened works, for the mature development of the conceptions of a charming fancy. He had given hostages to Fortune. He had a wife and four children, and no income but that which he made from week to week. The grist must be ground and the wheel revolve."

"For more than twenty years he [Blanchard] toiled on through the most fatiguing paths of literary composition, mostly in periodicals, often anonymously; pleasing and lightly instructing thousands, but gaining none of the prizes, whether of weighty reputation or popular renown, which more fortunate chances, or more pretending modes of investing talent, have given in our day to men of half his merits."

"The amiability of his disposition, and the thorough respectability of his character, no less than his ready talents and his growing repute, obtained for Laman Blanchard not only the society but the affection of many of the most eminent writers of his time."

"Of Shakespeare, not a line but has been repeatedly, and will continue to be cited, as a commentary on the great and various volume of human nature."

"I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example."

"His taste was formed in no exclusive schools, and he could admire whatever was good, no matter the rules or the contempt of rules by which it was produced. He was as free from envy and jealousy as a man can be; and few writers younger than himself will fail to remember the generous encouragement and seasonable notice which his connection with the press enabled his kindly temper to bestow."

"Perhaps the author cited is one of those, who, shunning the practice of the world, have taught the world to shun return! whose poetry is too finely spun, whose philosophy is too and mystified for popular demand: perhaps we have experienced feeling which Mr. Wordsworth alludes to, in a poem worthy of simplicity and loneliness of the sentiment—"Often have I sighed to measure By myself a lonely pleasure; Sighed to think I read a book Only read perhaps by me!""

"It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction."

"Two words of such a book, though possessing no peculiar signification, if met with in the dullest sentence, are enough: they call up, what has been finely termed, the "lightning of the mind." We feel an instantaneous kindness and reverence towards an author (together with a high opinion of his discrimination) who cites as it were the very language of our dreams—the secret converse of our own invisible spirit. We are almost startled at its being made public, and fancy that we have been at some time overheard reading. He is forthwith admitted a member of our heart's privy council. His hard words and bad reasoning are forgiven: we shut our ears to his angular periods—remembering only that his habits and desires, his sympathies, perceptions and enjoyments, are under the same master-key as our own—that he has struck into the same path, drank at the same brook, mused upon the same bank, and plucked almost the same leaf with ourselves."

"Pope abounds in quotable things, chiefly from his habit of making every line rest on its own merits—a circumstance that accounts, in its turn, for the strong resemblance his couplets bear to each other."

"How often does it happen that an obscure line finds its way into a periodical... is requoted in every book that comes out during the next three months, and "sleeps again!""

"From the date of our correspondence on this subject, I conceived a lively interest and a sincere friendship for Mr. Blanchard, which every year served to increase. It was impossible to know and not to love him. He was thoroughly honest, true, and genuine; ever ready to confer a kindness; and of a grateful disposition, which exaggerated into obligation the most commonplace returns to his own affectionate feelings and ready friendship. And yet ...we met more seldom than I could have wished, and, with a few exceptions among men of letters, our common associates were not the same."

"Everybody is seldom to be believed. "They say" is not proof that they know. On dit is French for a fib."

"When the error is universal, it is supposed to end. The adoption of the foundling establishes its consanguinity."

"Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation."

"As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and "nothing is but what is not.""

"The scarcity of truth is atoned for by the abundance of affidavits; if a rumor be impugned, its veracity is easily strengthened by additional emphasis of affirmation, until at last "everybody says so," and then it is undeniable."

"No prime-minister in the parliament of letters has, at any time, ventured to introduce a bill for the apprehension of all vagrant inverted commas that may be found trespassing in the sunny places of argument; and to restrain the poaching propensities of authors in general, who are apt to stroll without a license into the manors of other men's genius."

"Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids? Who ever skipped a quotation, though it made against the interest of the story? Besides, how many books might be numbered that are valuable only in a solitary quotation!—as the oyster is esteemed for the pearl it may sometimes contain."

"A genuine taradiddle of the gross and palpable kind never fails for want of vouchers. Hundreds know it to be true—hundreds more were all but eye-witnesses of the fact related—some actually were; all can attest it on their personal responsibility. Upon that point everybody has a reputation for veracity to stake—though the same stake had been forfeited fifty times; and everybody can contribute to the original story an unquestionable incident of his own coinage "to make assurance doubly sure." So it goes round, until the first projector hardly recognizes his own lie; and ends by believing ten times more absurdity than he had palmed upon others."