Playwrights From England

": You were disparaging my lover. : On the contrary, I was reminiscing about my wife. : It comes to the same thing. : Things mostly do, you know."

"Venice indeed imposes laziness. Even Americans doing Europe approach restfulness there. There is no hurrying a gondolier."

"It came to me this morning all unexpectedly, being the payment of a debt which I had long since given up hope of ever receiving. In other words, it is sheer profit, like all repaid loans."

"In France he would have been, I think, a sad bore, for there he would have discovered so many points of superiority to the English: but not even so keen a censor of his own country and countrymen as Mr. Dabney could find aught in Venice, except such forgivable and inimitable advantages as crumbling and picturesque architecture and clear skies, to hold up as a model for home adoption."

"As a child I had no doubts; but now? Take, for instance, telling the truth. I was brought up to believe that one should do that, and I knew a lie a mile off. But now I see that mendacity, or at any rate the suppression of one's real feelings and opinions, is the cement that binds society together."

""What I always wonder about Dickens," he said, "is how on earth did the man correct his proofs?" Because, as he went on to point out, between the time of writing and the time of correcting he must have thought of so many new descriptive touches, so many new creatures to add, so many new and adorable fantastic comments on life. How could he deny himself the joy of putting these in? — for there can be no pleasure like that of creation.”"

"We have to remember that children, as creatures of delight, are of comparatively recent discovery....A few poets had praised the young very gaily — Prior and Ambrose Phillips, for example — but rather as courtiers than human beings: it was left for Blake first to see that the child was not merely the young of man but a separate creature, filled with fugitive and exquisite charm."

"I never need to see any one twice to know them. My first impressions are always right. Sometimes I go back on my first impressions, but it is always a mistake to do so."

"A second-hand bookseller, I found, may read much in his time, but he cannot read continuously."

"After my experiences I know that it is not the disposal of books that presents the greatest difficulty to a bookseller, but the acquisition of them."

"I asked him how he kept his temper when customers were unreasonable. "Oh, that's all in the day's work," he said. "I know they don't mean it. It's not the gentlemen who are snappish, it's their empty stomachs...." "It is not the gentlemen," he went on, "that break a waiter's heart; it's the kitchen. That's where our trouble is. It's cooks that ruin eating-houses. A cook who has a grudge against a head-waiter can cost his governor pounds and pounds a day. It's all in his hands; he can spoil things, or he can keep them back till the customers bang out in a fury.... Gentlemen who blame waiters for being slow don't remember that the food has got to be cooked and served up, and that the waiter doesn't do either. "But there;" Mr. Duckie said, "an empty stomach can't remember everything. I often think this would be a better-tempered and happier world if we ate a little all the time instead of saving up our appetites for real meals. But speaking as a waiter, I can see it's best as it is.""

"Life is strangely suspicious and impatient of youth and candour and innocence and naïveté. Hardly does it perceive these exquisite qualities to exist than it rubs away their bloom with a rough finger. How often one longs for an arrested progress — for a little girl to go on being a little girl a little longer; for the perpetual kitten of our dreams! But no; the Creator is not that kind of artist."

"Apart from the necessity of replenishing his stock by attending sales and buying books; the wearing task of looking narrowly at larcenous fellow-creatures; the pangs that it must cost him to sell the books that he wants to keep; and the attacks made upon his tenderer feelings by unfortunate impoverished creatures with worthless books to sell; apart from these drawbacks, the life of a second-hand bookseller seems to me a happy one. I could myself lead it with considerable contentment."

""What was that?" said Grandmamma, who is not really deaf, but when in a tight place likes to gain time by this harmless imposition."

""Do you think women ought to have the vote?" I asked him. "My mother says," he replied, "that all the clever women have it already." "Has she got it?" I asked. He grinned. "I should rather say she had," he answered."

"Have misfortune and disease and frustration and insecurity been necessary to man's ingenuity and industry? Without sorrow should we have had no telegraph? without tears, no camera? Have all the benefits of civilisation been wrung from us in some effort to escape from the blows of fate? And even if so, might not happiness, without the advantages of progress, have still been better?"

"The art of life...is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you."

"The art of life...is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candour. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception."

"It was a dull day for English readers (I think) when the description of the person was first considered unnecessary. We rarely get it now."

"It is all as it should be if they were really friends once, for friends, in fact, belong to periods rather than to all time, although sentiment would have it otherwise. One is always changing a little, although of radical change there is almost none, and new friends are found in tune with each stage."

"The time for second-hand book-shops...is after one's work, not during one's work."

"Bachelors have many advantages, but they are all minor. Perhaps the greatest advantage they enjoy is that of still being able to follow an impulse; but even this rarely seems to give them all the pleasure that it would give many a man who has tasted restriction. Feeding on impulses can become as distasteful as feeding on jam roll."

""Well," I said, "I'm sorry if cheerfulness is so impracticable. It would be new, at any rate, and novelty is said to be a great thing." "Not in songs," replied Alf. "They don't want anything new in songs except the tune. They've all got to be about the same things for ever and ever.”"

"Libraries...he does not much esteem. People should own their books, he holds ; but that, of course, is a counsel of perfection, or would be were it not for the multitude of reprints that are now to be had at the price of a cigar."

"Virtue we still consider the best goal for others: but for ourselves, success. Success is the new god, and will be, I suppose, for some time yet, so zealously is the altar flame guarded."

"What can become of book-hunting...if everything is reprinted in uniform binding for a shilling or sixpence?"

"It was almost impossible for a book to carry no association for that swooping, pouncing brain. He either knew it, or knew of it, or had always wanted to know it."

"So long as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech. It is not humanly possible."

"I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian banquet."

"I had thought of a second-hand bookshop as being off the main stream of human frailty and temptation; and behold it was the resort of the most abandoned! Is there no natural honesty? I wished that Mr. Bemerton would return and liberate me to walk upstairs out of life again and get on with my make-believe."

"It is when one reads counsels of something more than perfection — counsels of pedantic priggishness, shall we say — to natural, healthy children, that one realises how necessary compromise is to daily life and how far removed perfection is from the natural human being."

"He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands— Ireland; and he came home from the sea in 1802, but he did not take his pen in hand until 1836, during which time his memory had purged itself of inessentials. He wrote them not for the cold eye of a publisher's reader but (like a gentleman) for his own family's entertainment."

"It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page."

"The true Londoner cares no straw for sanitation. He thrives on ill conditions."

"The crying need for the moment in this country, as in America, is a gospel of poverty to cope with the gospel of riches that is vitiating society."

"I have come to the conclusion that the golfing temperament is essentially aristocratic— a feudal inheritance — the property exclusively of those who can see nothing absurd or even degrading in the spectacle of powerful frivolous men being followed by boys of burden."

"To Naomi's serene, sane mind the world has to be accepted as it is, and therefore she is always the same. Not that she considers everything perfect, but she has an instinctive realisation of the inevitability of imperfection which keeps her contented — or at any rate prevents querulous discontent."

"Not the least remarkable thing in this wonderful world in which we grope and have our being, is the amazing differences that can exist in the children of the same parents."

"His mind...with all its vigour and acumen, though naturally inclined to justice and courage, is about as capable of impartiality as a prize-fighter is capable of metaphysics."

"There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy."

"The smell of autumnal woods, as well as of coffee roasting in the towns, is among the few things that the French arrange better than we."

"Poor G.K.C., his day is past— Now God will know the truth at last."

"Americans are people who prefer the Continent to their own country, but refuse to learn its languages."

"One must expect inconsistency. Every moment conditions are different, and therefore we are; every moment we are older, and there is less of life to live, and the thought can lead to odd impulses."

"In England it is a very dangerous handicap to have a sense of humour; and Whistler's levity had always stood in his way."

"The initial difficulty...having been slowly overcome...all went very smoothly, and the family quickly dropped company manners and showed me what it really was. Not that the difference was very marked, but a difference of course there always is — company manners being for the most part a kind of sandpaper that removes the asperities (and occasionally the attractions) of personality."

"Unhappily in England just now,...the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to be the least sagacious and the least independent."

"One of the most serious thoughts that life provokes is the reflection that we can never tell, at the time, whether a word, a look, a touch, an occurrence of any kind, is trivial or important."

"There are moments when one is more ashamed of what is called culture than any one can ever be of ignorance."

"I will admit to feeling exceedingly proud when any cat has singled me out for notice; for, of course, every cat is really the most beautiful woman in the room. That is part of their deadly fascination."