playwrights-from-england

""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."

"Then a very great war man, call'd Billy the Norman, Cried "D--n it, I never lik'd my land.""

"The Dons came to plunder the island; But, snug in the hive, the Queen was alive, And "buzz" was the word in the island."

"Longing while living for laurel and bays, Under this willow a poor poet 'lays'; With little to censure, and less to praise, He wrote twelve dozen and three score plays: He finish'd his 'Life', and he went his ways."

"Daddy Neptune one day to Freedom did say, If ever I live upon dry land, The spot I should hit on wou'd be little Britain! Says Freedom, "Why that's my own island!" O, it's a snug little island! A right little, tight little island, Search the globe round, none can be found So happy as this little island."

"Criticism is not a science whose elements can be mass-taught to adolescents — it is a difficult art, at which even adults are seldom a notable success. With the young the result is often that they either just regurgitate the judgements they have been taught, or else, if they have a natural and healthy rebelliousness, the opposite of what they have been taught. Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature except one’s own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence."

"I came one-half hour early. My watch [had] gone on a rampage. Lucas [is] a gray-haired man of about 60, [with] finely chiseled features, markedly piercing blue eyes — a look of intelligence and elegance about him — but the elegance is all in his face, not in his clothes. We talked about Bloomsbury. So much of what Lucas said was in quotations — English, French, and German — that I cannot remember or reproduce it. One emphasis he made was that Bloomsbury was a jungle — that the society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind. He kept insisting that Dickinson and Forster were not really in Bloomsbury. They were softhearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that. Lucas stayed out of this “jungle.” Also, they tormented each other with endless love affairs. Strachey was openly homosexual — a surprising thing in view of his later relationship with Carrington. Lucas went to Cambridge in 1913 [and] after one year went to war. Returned in 1919. Strachey and the rest were coming into their fame. The notoriety of Eminent Victorians was partly a chance of time and place—the frantic 20s were to assist him no end."

"Many honest folk feel it hard to deny the Sudetens self-determination, if they want to belong to the Reich. But then, can we deny it to the Czech areas among the Sudetens? Then what about Sudeten pockets in the Czech areas? Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things. You cannot have self-determination by villages. You may split Czechoslovakia now. In a few years it will be one again. Only it will be German. That is all.What would our own answer be, supposing we were expected on racial grounds to hand over to Berlin our coastal counties from Essex to Northumberland? We should reply that any nation must defend itself against a step which would make it impossible to defend itself.You cannot by any juggling with frontiers abolish racial minorities in Europe. And you cannot totally ignore geography. It follows that where you cannot move mountains you must move men. If the Sudetens are irrevocably set on being in the Reich let them go to the Reich instead of expecting the Reich to come to them. The Germans are the later comers in Bohemia. There are precedents for such an exodus. Good Aryans may disdain to copy Moses, but within these fifteen years just such an exchange of minorities has cured, as nothing else could have cured, the secular hate of Greek and Turk. If a small, poor and barren state like Greece could absorb between one and two million refugees it is absurd to pretend that a great country like Germany, which Hitler has set flowing with milk and honey, could not do as much and more. And if the Czechs can give a home to the persecuted refugees of the Axis, so much the better.This seems to me justice. The alternative is to admit the Trojan Horse into Prague. That may be the sort of fool's wisdom called "expediency"; it is the line of least resistance; but at least let us not cant about its honesty.Undoubtedly Hitler will object. He has other aims. It is not oppression he minds; the loudest yelps about persecution come from the persecutor of the Jews. Czechoslovakia lies on the flank of the German drive to the Black Sea. Therefore, Hitler will not hear reason.A question that vitally affects all Europe should be discussed by Europe. If Hitler foams at the mere mention of the League, let it be a European conference. Only let it give full weight to those smaller Powers which have often a more disinterested sense of decency than their great neighbours. If Hitler refuses he puts himself at once in the wrong. The verdict of such a conference may not convince him; but if he cannot reason, he can count."

"Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are."

"A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese."

"I throw my apple towards you. If you will love me, take it And give me in repayment your own maidenhead: If your will is what I would not, yet keep it still; and make it A lesson of how swiftly all loveliness is fled."

"The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt."

"Time is a feather'd thing, And, whilst I praise The sparklings of thy looks and call them rays, Takes wing, Leaving behind him as he flies An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes."

"It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'."

"Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm. When Athens had decayed and Alexandria sprawled, the new giant-city, across the Egyptian sands; when the Greek world was filling with libraries and emptying of poets, growing in erudition as its genius expired, then first appeared, as pompous as Herod and as worm-eaten, that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more, which replaces depth by muddiness, beauty by echoes, passion by necrophily."

"Paris may pass in gas and flame and blood — We shall sit safe behind our sundering flood. Berlin may build a Holier Inquisition — It will but mean an extra-late edition. Hitler be hailed through all a wrecked Ukraine — We shall just read, and turn to golf again. For God, the day our guardian seas He took, Gave us the broad breast of a Beaverbrook; Round us, though fails the Channel — never fear! — Still lie the stainless depths of Rothermere."

"My dream is of a British statesman who could say to his countrymen: "You are sick of war, weary of entanglements. There are some who would have you renounce both. I offer you instead a heavier load of foreign responsibilities, a risk of new war. Because that is the only road to lasting peace. Since the War, British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble. Be bold at last, and give a lead to Europe, by offering to form with France and whatever other European states will join, a League within the League, of nations pledged to submit all disputes to the League, but pledged also to fight without hesitation in defence of any member of the group who is attacked. If Germany will join, so much the better; though Germany as she is never will. If America, better still; for the present America is a broken reed. All the more honor for us to accept a responsibility if she refuses."The way will not be easy. We shall often regret the day we pledged ourselves to bear taxation in peace and face death in war for interests and frontiers not our own. But no interest is more really our own than the reign of law between nations."That is little likely to happen. Only an Abraham Lincoln takes risks of that sort with a nation. But this is not because the ordinary politician is wiser; it is because the ordinary politician does not realize the latent force of idealism, all the stronger with the decay of the religions which gave it other outlets, ready in the world of to-day for any leader with the courage to use it; and so easily abused accordingly by the rulers of Moscow and Berlin."

"Considering what was to come, the much-abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens."

"On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey, A voice still whispers in me, far away – A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly There rises from the dead that shadowy hell, The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand, The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land, A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle. Then fades the phantom, and once more I know Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now, Our battlefields reconquered by the plough, And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago."

"Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed."

"It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen."

"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."

"Beside the grey sea-shingle, here at the cross-roads' meeting, I, Hermes, stand and wait, where the windswept orchard grows. I give, to wanderers weary, rest from the road and greeting: Cool and unpolluted from my spring the water flows."

"Let's number out the hours by blisses, And count the minutes by our kisses."

"In The Waste Land Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior."

"Although beneath this grave-mound thy white bones now are lying, Surely, my huntress Lycas, the wild things dread thee still. The memory of thy worth tall Pêlion keeps undying, And the looming peak of Ossa, and Cithæron’s lonely hill."

"And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them."

"A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father — if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out."

"The science of fools with long memories."

"Asking Theodore Hook what sort of a looking man the dramatist and author Planché was, "Short and bald," Thoms replied: "he used to cut his hair, but now his hair has cut him.""

"O that I were a veil upon that face, To hide it from the world; methinks I could Envy the very Sun, for gazing on you!"

"When I was but thirteen or so I went into a golden land, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi Took me by the hand."

"Everything has a cause and the cause of anything is everything."

"The mind of the people is like mud, From which arise strange and beautiful things."

"She would rather be an old man's darling than a young man's warling."

"He went about his work — such work as few Ever had laid on head and heart and hand — As one who knows, where there’s a task to do, Man’s honest will must Heaven’s good grace command."

"How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true."

"The Old World and the New, from sea to sea, Utter one voice of sympathy and shame! Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high, Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came."

"You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, You, who, with mocking pencil, wont to trace, Broad for self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face."

"Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal – you sockdologizing old man-trap!"

"Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen, To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men."

"I would not take life but on terms of death, That sting in the wine of being, salt of its feast."

"With sward of parsley and of violet, And poplars shivering in a silvery dream, And smell of cedar sawn, and sandal-wood, And these low-crying birds that haunt the deep."

"The love that shall not weary, must be art."

"O death, thou hast a beckon to the brave, Thou last sea of the navigator, last Plunge of the diver, and last hunter's leap."

"I have learned to dread what cometh suddenly, And sniff about a sweet thing like a hound: And most I dread the sudden gifts of gods."

"Duty, that grey ash of a burnt-out fire, That lie between a woman and a man!"

"She hath no skill in living—but to love."

"I tell you we are fooled by the eye, the ear, These organs muffle us from that real world That lies about us, we are duped by brightness. The ear, the eye doth make us deaf and blind; Else should we be aware of all our dead, Who pass above us, through us and beneath us."

"To me it seems that they who grasp the world, The Kingdom and the power and the glory, Must pay with deepest misery of spirit, Atoning unto God for a brief brightness, And ever ransom, like this rigid king, The outward victory with inward loss."