Novelists From England

"I'm more contented and at peace with myself now than I was as a box-office queen. I'm less uptight. I've even reached a stage where it doesn't shatter me if somebody prints something bad about me."

"I certainly wouldn't compare the rewards of watching one's children grow and mature with that of money piling up at the box office. Both are pleasant, but to varying degrees. As the old saying goes, you can't take an audience home with you. You can't depend on the loyalty of fans, who, after all is said and done, are just faceless people one seldom sees. And few stars have their fans forever. But a child is forever. That bond and relationship is timeless and doesn't depend on your looks, age or popularity at the moment."

"Does Mary Poppins have an orgasm? Does she go to the bathroom? I assure you, she does."

"I saw The Sound of Music again recently, and I loved it. Probably it's a more valuable film now than when it first came out, because some of the things it stood for have already disappeared. There's a kind of naive loveliness about it, and love goes by so fast … love and music and happiness and family, that's what it's all about. I believe in these things. It would be awful not to, wouldn't it?"

"I think of part of myself as a very passionate person, but I don't think that comes across. I don't know where it comes from, that reserve or veneer of British niceness. But it doesn't bother me if other people don't spot the passion. I know it's there... As long as Blake knows."

"That's All Folks!"

"Can I give them what they think they're going to get from me? That's always the big question."

"James Anthony Froude was one of the salient figures of mid-Victorian England. In that society of prepotent personages he more than held his own. He was not merely the author of the famous History; he was a man of letters who was also a man of the world, an accomplished gentleman, whose rich nature overflowed with abounding energy, a sportsman, a yachtsman, a brilliant and magnificent talker—and something more: one in whose presence it was impossible not to feel a hint of mystery, of strange melancholy, an uncomfortable suggestion of enigmatic power."

"Froude informs the Scottish youth That parsons do not care for truth. The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries History is a pack of lies. What cause for judgments so malign? A brief reflexion solves the mystery— Froude believes Kingsley a divine. And Kingsley goes to Froude for History."

"Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius."

"I fancy that no competent critic now ventures to deny that the four volumes of Thomas Carlyle contain one of the half-dozen great biographies in the English language."

"The general modern histories, such as Lingard's and Froude's are too well known to need further description; but it may be remarked that there is inadequate justification for the systematic detraction of Froude's History which has become the fashion. He held strong views, and he made some mistakes; but his mistakes were no greater than those of other historians, and there are not half a dozen histories in the English language which have been based on so exhaustive a survey of original materials."

"The classic for the period from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Armada and one of the great masterpieces of English historical literature. Based upon very wide research in English and continental archives. Not accurate in detail and coloured throughout by a strong anti-catholic bias, but invaluable."

"Success is terrifying. Like happiness, it is often appreciated in retrospect. It's only later that you place it in perspective. Years from now, I'll look back and say, "God, wasn't it wonderful?""

"He had a very high standard of right and wrong. He hated all shams, religious, literary, political. The casuistry of the rhetorician, the sophistical make-believe of the worldly ecclesiastic, he could not abide. In public as in private they were abhorrent to him. But while he had a passionate scorn of meanness and truckling, he had an equally passionate reverence for truth, as he understood it, whatever guise it assumed. The mask might be sometimes as impassive as Disraeli's; but behind it was an almost tremulous sensitiveness—a tenderness easily wounded. His presence was striking and impressive,—coal-black eyes, wonderfully lustrous and luminous ("eyes full of genius—the glow from within,"—as Dr John Brown wrote); coal-black hair, only latterly streaked with grey; massive features strongly lined,—massive yet mobile, and capable of the subtlest play of expression. For myself I can say without any reserve that he was, upon the whole, the most interesting man I have ever known."

"What he [Charles Stewart Parnell] did say was that there were two ways, and two ways only, in which Ireland could be governed. One was by full Home Rule. The other was through a Dictator. But for such Dictatorship there was one man unfit, and he was Mr. Arthur Balfour. I was the more impressed by this because he had said to me only a few minutes before that he had been reading a most remarkable book, which threw more light on the Irish question than any book he had seen. I had eagerly asked what this new source of knowledge was, and he replied, "It is a book called The English in Ireland by a Mr. Froude.""

"In the spring of 1879... I sat next to Froude [at dinner], who had just returned from South Africa. He had, during his stay there, contributed a number of articles to the public press upon the condition and future of that country. He talked delightfully, but he took an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the position of the white races in South Africa. He pointed out to me that there was a virile and intelligent race, physically stronger than the average European, who were multiplying and increasing faster than white men under the influence of civilisation, and that these Zulus and Kaffirs would ultimately demolish the white race. I asked him what was his policy, and in a gloomy tone he informed me there was no policy but to exterminate them. I pointed out to him the extreme difficulty of such a policy in these days of sentiment and humanitarianism. He replied: "If you do not adopt that policy, they will exterminate you." A few months afterwards I noted that he was giving a series of lectures at the Philosophical Institute in Edinburgh on South Africa. My curiosity was excited as to how he would put his singularly bloodthirsty theories into a shape which would be palatable to his audience. In the meantime he had entirely changed his views, and his method for settling the South African problem was to treat the native races with firmness but perfect justice. Notwithstanding his rare literary ability, he did not impress me as a reliable or far-seeing thinker."

"Hopefully, I brought people a certain joy. That will be a wonderful legacy."

"Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself."

"The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence."

"The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought."

"Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them."

"On the whole, and as a rule, superior strength is the equivalent of superior merit; and when a weaker people are induced or forced to part with their separate existence, and are not treated as subjects, but are admitted freely to share the privileges of the nation in which they are absorbed, they forfeit nothing which they need care to lose, and rather gain than suffer by the exchange."

"Where freedom is so precious that without it life is unendurable, men with those convictions fight too fiercely to be permanently subdued. Truth grows by its own virtue, and falsehood sinks and fades. An oppressed cause, when it is just, attracts friends, and commands moral support, which converts itself sooner or later into material strength. As a broad principle it may be said, that as nature has so constituted us that we must be ruled in some way, and as at any given time the rule inevitably will be in the hands of those who are then the strongest, so nature also has allotted superiority of strength to superiority of intellect and character; and in deciding that the weaker shall obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from themselves, and then most confers true liberty when she seems most to be taking it away. There is no freedom possible to man except in obedience to law; and those who cannot prescribe a law to themselves, if they desire to be free must be content to accept direction from others."

"After my death I wish no other herald, no other speaker of my living actions, to keep my honour from corruption, but such an honest chronicler as Froude."

"The right to resist depends on the power of resistance. A nation which can maintain its independence possesses already, unless assisted by extraordinary advantages of situation, the qualities which conquest can only justify itself by conferring. It may be held to be as good in all essential conditions as the nation which is endeavouring to overcome it; and human society has rather lost than gained when a people loses its freedom which knows how to make a wholesome use of freedom. But when resistance has been tried and failed—when the inequality has been proved beyond dispute by long and painful experience—the wisdom, and ultimately the duty, of the weaker party is to accept the benefits which are offered in exchange for submission: and a nation which at once will not defend its liberties in the field, nor yet allow itself to be governed, but struggles to preserve the independence which it wants the spirit to uphold in arms by insubordination and anarchy and secret crime, may bewail its wrongs in wild and weeping eloquence in the ears of mankind,—may at length, in a time when the methods by which sterner ages repressed this kind of conduct are unpermitted, make itself so intolerable as to be cast off and bidden go upon its own bad way: but it will not go for its own benefit. It will have established no principle, and vindicated no natural right. Liberty profits only those who can govern themselves better than others can govern them, and those who are able to govern themselves wisely have no need to petition for a privilege which they can keep or take for themselves."

"A natural right to liberty, irrespective of the ability to defend it, exists in nations as much as and no more than it exists in individuals. Had nature meant us to live uncontrolled by any will but our own, we should have been so constructed that the pleasures of one would not interfere with the pleasures of another, or that each of us would discharge by instinct those duties which the welfare of the community requires from all. In a world in which we are made to depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our neighbours, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and worthiness of character, the superior part has a natural right to govern; the inferior part has a natural right to be governed; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human beings."

"Among wild beasts and savages might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings right is for ever tending to create might. Inferiority of numbers is compensated by superior cohesiveness, intelligence, and daring. The better sort of men submit willingly to be governed by those who are nobler and wiser than themselves; organization creates superiority of force; and the ignorant and the selfish may be and are justly compelled for their own advantage to obey a rule which rescues them from their natural weakness. There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, when they can be led or driven into more honourable courses; and the rights of man—if such rights there be—are not to liberty, but to wise direction and control."

"The independence of nations is spoken of sometimes as if it rested on another foundation—as if each separate race or community had a divine titledeed to dispose of its own fortunes, and develop its tendencies in such direction as seems good to itself. But the assumption breaks down before the enquiry, What constitutes a nation? And the right of a people to self-government consists and can consist in nothing but their power to defend themselves. No other definition is possible. Are geographical boundaries, is a distinct frontier, made the essential? Mountain chains, rivers, or seas form, no doubt, the normal dividing lines between nation and nation, because they are elements of strength, and material obstacles to invasion. But as the absence of a defined frontier cannot take away a right to liberty where there is strength to maintain it, a mountain barrier conveys no prerogative against a power which is powerful enough to overleap that barrier, nor the ocean against those whose larger skill and courage can convert the ocean into a highway."

"When two countries, or sections of countries, stand geographically so related to one another that their union under a common government will conduce to the advantage of one of them, such countries will continue separate as long only as there is equality of force between them, or as long as the country which desires to preserve its independence possesses a power of resistance so vigorous that the effort to overcome it is too exhausting to be permanently maintained."

"I came home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way, with Mr. Froude; a mind which I am sure you would have appreciated and enjoyed as thoroughly as I did. I don't know if you are as warm an admirer of his writing as I am; to me there is no English prose equal to some passages of his; such, for instance, as that about the middle of the first chapter of his history—"For indeed a change was coming upon the world." It was rather a sad mind too, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the highest appreciation and with wonderful beauty of language some gallant deed of one of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. He seemed to have gone through every phase of thought, and come to the end "all is vanity." He himself used to say the interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at thirty or thirty-five. After that there remained nothing but disappointment of earlier visions and hopes. Thank goodness I have not thought quite so fast! Sometimes there was something almost fearful in the gloom and utter disbelief and defiance of his mind."

"You have the misfortune to possess a soil and climate of unexampled excellence, and a position on the globe the most attractive to every ambitious and aggressive Power. The independence of South Africa will come when you can reply to these Powers with shot and shell (vociferous cheering); and you will do that when you have ceased to turn your energies into the most immediate and easy way of making money for yourselves, and have set heartily to work to bring out the resources of your soil. I honour and admire the achievement of national independence, because it can be achieved only by courage and self-denial and hardihood of habit of life."

"The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian government has been called despotism tempered with assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination. Unfortunately the wrong man was generally assassinated. The true criminal was an absentee, and his agent was shot instead of him. A noble lord living in England, two of whose agents had lost their lives already in his service, ordered the next to post a notice in his Barony that he intended to persevere in what he was doing, and if the tenants thought they would intimidate him by shooting his agents, they would find themselves mistaken."

"When the ties of kindred and of speech have force enough to bind together a powerful community, such a community may be able to defend its independence. If it fail, the pretension in itself has no claim on the consideration of the rest of mankind."

"Christ came bringing with him the knowledge that God was not a demon, but a being of infinite goodness—that the service required of mankind was not a service of ceremony, but a service of obedience and love—obedience to laws of morality, and love and charity towards man."

"Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last."

"The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key."

"Perhaps the heart does not deceive; never does give a false answer, except to those double-minded unhappy ones who do care about themselves, and so play tricks with it and tamper with it."

"When a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of the one feeling; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the past, the future, they are names to her light as the breath which speaks them; her soul is full."

"All, all nature is harmonious, and must and shall be harmony for ever; even we, poor men, with our wild ways and frantic wrongs, and crimes, and follies, to the beings out beyond us and above us, seem, doubtless, moving on our own way under the broad dominion of universal law. The wretched only feel their wretchedness: in the universe all is beautiful. Ay, to those lofty beings, be they who they will, who look down from their starry thrones on the strange figures flitting to and fro over this earth of ours, the wild recklessness of us mortals with each other may well lose its painful interest. Why should our misdoings cause more grief to them than those of the lower animals to ourselves? Pain and pleasure are but forms of consciousness; we feel them for ourselves, and for those who are like ourselves. To man alone the doings of man are wrong; the evil which is with us dies out beyond us; we are but a part of nature, and blend with the rest in her persevering beauty. Poor consolers are such thoughts, for they are but thoughts, and, alas! our pain we feel."

"It remains a lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous. It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the official report of the proceedings:—Towards the end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch' called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again. Her legs were put in the caschilaws — an iron frame which was gradually heated till it burned into the flesh — but no confession could be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched, perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was placed in the 'lang irons' — some accursed instrument; I know not what. Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,' — the iron boot you may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home, crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There was a machine called the piniwinkies — a kind of thumbscrew, which brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything they wished. She confessed her witchcraft — so tried, she would have confessed to the seven deadly sins — and then she was burned, recalling her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence. It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more wholesome lesson — more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people."

"How true it is that arguments have only power over us while the temper is disposed to listen to them!"

"She would gladly have been more to him than she could be — because she felt (she did not deny it to herself) that she would sooner have been his wife than Leonard's. But why, because they could not be all to one another, must they be as nothing?"

"It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with."

"Froude's novel must be introduced to the twentieth century with the distinction of being the only book piously burnt at Oxford in the nineteenth century. On February 27, 1849, a few weeks after its publication, Professor Sewell, lecturer in Exeter College, vehemently denounced the work in his lecture, and discovering that a student present had a copy before him seized it furiously and dashed it in the Hall fire."

"It is strange, when something rises before us as a possibility which we have hitherto believed to be very dreadful, we fancy it is a great crisis; that when we pass it we shall be different beings; some mighty change will have swept over our nature, and we shall lose entirely all our old selves, and become others. … Yet, when the thing, whether good or evil, is done, we find we were mistaken; we are seemingly much the same — neither much better nor worse; and then we cannot make it out; on either side there is a weakening of faith; we fancy we have been taken in; the mountain has heen in lahour, and we are perplexed to find the good less powerful than we expected, and the evil less evil."

"Some few intense enjoyments are given us in life; among them all, perhaps, there is none with so deep a charm as to sit by the side of those we love, and watch them sleeping. Sleep is so innocent, so peaceful in its mystery and its helplessness; and sitting there we can fancy ourselves the guardian angels holding off the thousand evils imagination paints for ever hanging over what is most precious, most dear to us. The long deep-drawn breathing; the smile we love to hope is called up over the features by our own presence in the heart; there are no moments in life we would exchange for the few we have spent by the side of these."

"Our characters change as world eras change, as our features change, slowly from day to day. Nothing is sudden in this world. Inch hy inch; drop by drop; line by line. Even when great convulsions shatter down whole nations, cities, monarchies, systems, human fortunes, still they are but the finish, the last act of the same long preparing, slowly devouring change, in which the tide of human affairs for ever ebbs and flows, without haste, and without rest."

"How can we help loving best those who first gave us possession of ourselves? All the day long they were together: living as they did, they could not help being so; only parting at night for a few short hours to dream over the happy past day, and to meet again the next morning, the happier for their brief separation. It was a new life to him: what had often hung before him as a fairy vision — what he had longed for, but never found; and here, as if sent down from heaven, was what more than answered to his wildest dreams. Now for the first time he found himself loved for himself — slighted and neglected as he had been .... suddenly he was singled out by a fascinating woman, who made no secret of the pleasure his friendship gave her."

"The student running over the records of other times finds certain salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation, may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in Scottish character."