essayists-from-england

"In the days of my early acquaintance with Henley, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I could never look at him without wondering why none of his artist friends had taken him for a model of Pan. They say he was like Johnson, and like Heine; and he had something of both. But to me he was the startling image of Pan come on earth and clothed—the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river, with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening, like those of some Faun or Satyr of the ancient woods, and the brow and eyes of the Olympians. Wellnigh captive to his chair, with the crutch never far from his elbow, dragging himself when he moved, with slow effort, he yet seemed instinct with the life of the germinating elemental earth, when gods and men were vital with the force that throbbed in beast and flower and wandering breeze. The large heart, and the large frame, the broad tolerant smile, the inexhaustible interest in nature and mankind, the brave, unquenchable cheerfulness under afflictions and adversities, the frank appreciation and apology for the animal side of things, all helped to maintain the impression of a kind of Pagan strength and simplicity."

""Lest that by any means When I have preached to others I myself Should be a castaway." If some one now Would take that text and preach to us that preach — * * * Yes I preach to others And am—I know not what—a castaway? No, but a man who feels his heart asleep, As he might feel his hand or foot. The limb Will not awake without a little shock, A little pain perhaps, a nip or blow, And that one gives and feels the waking pricks. But for one's heart I know not. I can give No shock to make mine prick."

"It is impossible to maintain that these attributes [caution and progress] have been constant in the two great English parties. The Conservatives or Tories have often been progressive; the Liberals or Whigs stationary or retrogressive. Macaulay, in his famous reply to Lord Mahon, maintained that the Whigs had always kept in advance of the Tories, even though the whole nation might have moved onwards, just as the forelegs of the stag are always leading.But in fact both parties have passed and repassed one another, and have frequently exchanged places and influence; each by turn has had its phases of protection and free trade, imperialism and insularity, democracy and oligarchy, socialism and individualism. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, and down to the accession to power of William Pitt, the Tories, with some justice, boasted that they were the representatives of popular rights and national interests as against the aristocratic Whig cliques; and until the outbreak of the great war with France, it was the Whigs who were usually the party of foreign adventure and expansion, while the Tories had rather a stronger leaning towards peace and retrenchment and economic progress. Political reform has never been a Liberal monopoly; and social reform has found its champions at least as often in the Conservative ranks as in those of their rivals. On the other hand, the Conservatives, until the Beaconsfield Ministry of 1874, were not specially identified with the maintenance of the Empire; and in the 'fifties and sixties, under Lord Derby and Disraeli himself, they were less ardent vindicators of English pretensions abroad than the dominant section of the Liberals under Palmerston.Thus it is a difficult, perhaps even an impossible, task to draw a dividing line from age to age between the two parties, on the basis of doctrine. But the fact is that Englishmen, in their public as in their private life, have no great regard for abstract generalisations. They are careless about measures and much more particular about men. Fidelity to persons, rather than to principles, is the spirit of our party life."

"When men live in small communities, ... they cannot avoid personal participation in some public functions. So it was in the older rural England, before the organic social changes of the last century. Where a family might go without its winter firing, if the Lord of the Manor prohibited the cutting of turf and the collection of wood, every tenant would be a self-appointed member of a Commons Preservation Society. Much satire has been wasted over the Parish Pump; but one can understand the interest that humble installation must have possessed for the little group of households, which had to draw their own water from it daily in their own buckets. There were civic duties to discharge as well as civic rights to vindicate."

"Surely the excellence of all poetry — what puts Shelley above Keats, Goethe above Shelley (in his Lyrics), and English, German and Italian Poetry so incomparably above French—surely the great thing is the co-ordination into a total mood, as distinguished from the charm of detached metaphors or descriptions or verses."

"There is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much."

"Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of leisure time, but what we really mean thereby is time in which we can feel at leisure. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined."

"Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets the Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal’s trainbearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four candles made of dead men’s fat, and perform certain rites about which he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men’s fat for the candles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish. “If it were not for that,” says Sor Asdrubale, “the Government would have had to suppress the lottery ages ago—eh!”"

"There is something about the big, stately house, where the Immortal One had received all the minor Olympians, or their homage, which makes one feel why that grandson gradually left it to the portraits of the Friends and the Sweethearts, and to the Plaster-casts (gathering a garment of sooty dust), which seem in some hieratic relation to the busts and paintings and prints and silhouettes of that Man-God, portrayed at every age, and with every unlikeliness of smirk and frown, from the eye-flashing aquiline youth with locks tied back in a bag, half-Werther, half-Wilhelm Meister, through every variety of Goethe travelling through life with Roman ruins or grand ducal palaces as background, to Goethe in all the different forbiddingnesses of old age. Forbidding, but not enough, alas I for the sycophancies of Eckermann, the theatricalities of Byron, the shakable sentimental conceit of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who sends him a copy of verses and (of all embarrassing untidy presents) a long tail of "a woman's hair." (Faugh!) There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds: a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity."

"As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking."

"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as if it required some to complete it." "I hope not," answered Oke, gravely. His gravity made me smile. "Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked. "If there are such things as ghosts," he replied," I don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a warning or a punishment."

"Having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma."

"Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have not loved enough in life. But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of Might-have-been."

"This fascination with the whale, like ’s report from Southampton Water, was an expression of Victorian fashion, a characteristic marriage of ingenious science and human curiosity. In England, live whales were delivered to aquaria in and (although one show was closed, for fear the flagrant activities of its performers should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a arrived in , in the centre of the world's greatest city."

"People say, Why didn’t you get a dog? I guess the big question is, Why didn’t you find a human? In a way, I tried. I fell in love with a friend of mine, a very nice man. I think I freaked him out, deeply, because I was broken. He ran away. So maybe there was a feeling that the hawk was safe. But is very strange in that it’s very much about letting things go. These birds are flown free; once you’ve got them tame and trained, you let them go every day! And hope they come back to you. When they do, that reestablishes the sense that things can return."

"We are pretty much in the right now, we just expect it to take place in 24 hours. Actually, it just takes place in a slightly longer timeframe. It is going to be grim. We are going to have to adapt."

"Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what s and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries."

"It’s true, you can go nuts when you suddenly lose someone you love, you fall off the world. I saw in the goshawk — this ferocious, intense, bloodthirsty, murderous creature — what I felt: rage-filled and angry, living in the present with no thought for the future. My mistake was identifying too much with the bird and forgetting how to be a human."

"' ... tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a . This isn't as strange as it sounds: Macdonald, who became obsessed with as a child, has flown many falcons over the years, and it's who has died so suddenly, a man she associates strongly with her passion (a press photographer, he and his daughter were good companions, sharing a certain beadiness and the ability to be vastly patient). But in another way it's perverse. Goshawks are by reputation the ruffians of , being bloodthirsty, temperamental and supposedly difficult to tame."

"s are various creatures and we’ve recruited them to symbolise many things. s are a placeholder for social anxieties: reviled as invading thugs in the , their crime seems little more than failing to treat humans and human spaces with due respect. Other seabirds, like s and s, fall into the anthropomorphised category of cute little guys, mable avian '. And oceanic specialists like s and s spend so much of their lives at sea, visiting their nesting burrows in darkness, they seem barely part of our world at all: the Other rendered in feathers. But in my lifetime, seabirds have symbolised one thing above all: . News photographs of s thickly coated in horrified me when I was young; their gluey silhouettes are still seared into my brain."

"Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All of this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can't be seen except through what anthropologist described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world."

"s nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by s; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies. During World War II, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed , reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar, flashing and twirling as it fell. They mate on the wing. And while young martins and s return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers."

"Behind me, bare s and es lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, drew the abbey's ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 stayed at on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing scenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle,"

"Hoare's Leviathan is part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale. ... He traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a at . Hoare now frequently travels to as a volunteer on a identification programme."

"… He moves from personal to literary history with muscular seamlessness (much as he did in the earlier books). We leap from Melville to Robert Louis Stevenson to the inevitable Byron; from Elizabeth Barrett Browning – “ in ” – to Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. There are passages about Oscar Wilde and , both of whom Hoare addressed in earlier, rather lighter-hearted biographies. There’s some lovely stuff on Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen – “he looks like a boy you knew at school”. … … RisingTideFallingStar is about the author’s relationship to the sea, but then that could be said about both Leviathan and The Sea Inside. What changes with each subsequent book is that the authorial gaze becomes increasingly inward and self-revealing, the tone more forlorn, until some passages in RisingTideFallingStar attain an almost posthumous air, as if the book might also serve as a suicide note."

"As the slipped towards spring and cases of began to blossom horribly across the map of Europe, I was in Costa Rica on a wildlife-watching tour. For two weeks I shared a minibus with a group of retired British folk whose main aim was to see as many birds as possible: we met every evening to tick off the species we’d seen that day from a ready-printed list. We saw s, s, s, s, hawks, a whole cavalcade of tiny , s that snapped and buzzed through the air like animated electrons. ... ... I realised that this trip was disquieting me because we weren’t learning anything much about the birds we saw: we were identifying them, ticking them off a list, and moving on, caught up in a hungry and expectant apperception of the world in which the lived reality of the creatures that flew and sang around us seemed almost entirely obscured by the triumphant, costly light of seeing them."

"With the 1927 publication of In Search of England, H. V. Morton began to establish his name as the most popular travel writer in Britain. Part of Morton's appeal, particularly to the lower middle class, was that he engagingly interwove human interest accounts of his journeys with potted historical and literary vignettes to convey the sense of an enjoyable holiday. Yet beyond these seemingly casual aspects lay serious ideological purposes, and these are of importance in exploring interwar views on . Morton insisted that the nations's strength ultimately depended on the health of its rural areas. Yet the urban and industrial revolutions had inflicted fundamental damage on the fabric of the nation. Morton called for renewed recognition of the central continuities, especially , in ."

"What appeals to me about Morton's work is that you are reading two histories at once. As he recounts stories of the and eras, he is also giving a contemporary account of a world that has entirely vanished. He writes with a crisp matter-of-factness about his faith and his place as an Englishman abroad in the 1930s. I don't mean in a colonially superior way, but just with a certainty that I think few could express today. In the book he is mostly exploring the youthful nation state of 's . For Morton, visiting what remains of the places where stayed is often a case of begging a ride from a local. It is still an age when traveling in the near East is more an expedition than a holiday. When Morton visits the site of the for example, it is a waterlogged ruin, where he imagines the frogs to be croaking out her name. A plate image in the book shows a desolate empty location, and he laments the mutilated statues on the road from the village of ."

"Shakespeare's London was a small walled town whose gates were shut each night with the coming of darkness. His contemporaries went a-Maying and gathering s where now are tramcars and gasometers. A Londoner was to Shakespeare a man who was born probably within sound of , who worked and slept within the ancient town wall of London, and would probably die there and be buried in one of the city churchyards. London three centuries ago was a small comprehensible cathedral city standing behind its wall, and its citizens could look at it and walk all round it, as men can walk round and . A mile or so away was the royal , where the King lived. There were two ways to it, one by river and the other along the strand of the . To the north of the were meadows and hedges, a , a and more fields stretching up to a rural lane that led to and was to become known by the odd name of ."

"In the quiet village of , men still talk about the as though it happened last week. Eyam is the last place in England with a vivid memory of the . Eyam is a mile-long street of fortress-like stone houses set in a cosy cleft of the wild moors. There is a church, a manor-house behind a wall, and the remains of the village stocks. I went into the church, where the elderly caretaker began to talk, as they all do in Eyam, of the Plague ... (She might have been talking about that year's influenza!)"

"At the highest point of the stands the and the 's private walk. At this part of the hill has never been built over, or shaved off and lowered, like so many of the famous , it preserved its original height. ... I do not know of a more beautifully situated radio station, unless it is on its Pyrenean mountain, whose insistent voice dominates the air over southern France and northern Spain. The immensely powerful Vatican Radio broadcasts on twenty-four short, and three medium, wave-lengths and in every language."

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

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

"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."

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

"There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy."

"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."

"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."

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

"The special quality of the act of finding something, with its consequent exhilaration, is half unexpectedness and half separateness. There being no warning, and the article coming to you by chance, no one is to be thanked, no one to be owed anything. In short, you have achieved the greatest human triumph — you have got something for nothing."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The mere fact of never having a holiday is not in itself distressing. Holidays often are overrated disturbances of routine, costly and uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their ravages."

"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."

""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.”"