Novelists From England

"Economy was always "elegant", and money-spending always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied."

"A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly."

"I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent."

"The children did not remain children long. Boys of seven or eight went to work in the fields... Girl children of ten or eleven sent out into service..."

"Madame George Sand said, some months ago, in conversation with an English friend, "Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish—she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and which every girl will be the better for reading.""

"Thinking more of others’ happiness than of her own was very fine; but did it not mean giving up her very individuality, quenching all the warm love, the true desires, that made her herself? Yet in this deadness lay her only comfort; so it seemed."

"It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt."

"and so the shadows ripple on until it's time to part"

"I'll not listen to reason…Reason always means what someone else has got to say."

"Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant."

"Were all men equal to-night, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow."

"A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease."

"That kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations."

"In private life Mrs. Gaskell was distinguished for a large-hearted but unobtrusive benevolence, which secured her sympathy for any good cause, and led her to devote much time and strength to personal and helpful intercourse with her poorer neighbours. It was doubtless in this manner that she acquired the intimate acquaintance with the life of the lower, middle, and working classes, which gave much of their peculiar interest to her writings. Her conversational powers were very remarkable, and her society was much sought in some of the highest and most cultivated circles of London and Paris. Few persons could leave behind them a larger number of attached friends."

"It is odd enough to see how the entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women calms down the little discordances and the disturbance of mood."

"[I]t was her three autobiographical novels that brought her fame—"Lark Rise" (1939), "Over to Candleford" (1941), and "Candleford Green" (1943). In this trilogy is preserved a picture of rural life of the 70's and 80's which has perhaps never been more truthfully or enchantingly portrayed."

"Mrs. Gaskell...may be claimed as belonging to this town, during her infancy and early life up to the time of her marriage. There is one work of hers, Cranford, which in my judgment, while depicting life in almost any country town, is especially descriptive of some of the past and present social characteristics of Knutsford. I know that the work was not intended to delineate this place chiefly or specially, but a little incident within my own experience will show the accuracy of the pictures as applied to our town. A woman of advanced age, who was confined to her house through illness, about three years ago, asked me to lend her an amusing or cheerful book. I lent her Cranford, without telling her to what it was supposed to relate; she read the tale of Life in a Country Town; and when I called again, she was full of eagerness to say:—"Why, Sir! that Cranford is all about Knutsford; my old mistress, Miss Harker, is mentioned in it; and our poor cow, she did go to the field in a large flannel waistcoat, because she had burned herself in a lime pit." For myself I must say that I consider Cranford to be full of good-natured humour and kindliness of spirit."

"Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of this opposition."

"Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross."

"Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer."

"Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived."

"There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order."

"Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues."

"Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude."

"Every false philosophy is an imagination of a world propitious to irrational demands and unregulated desires. The false philosopher's dream infects someone in closer touch than himself with everyday experience, this agent of his desire seeks to translate the dream into reality, and disaster follows. It is the Cinderella story in actual life. Rousseau was Robespierre's fairy godmother, Karl Marx was Lenin's, Nietzsche was Hitler's."

"The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy."

"Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action."

"The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world."

"What, still alive at twenty-two, A clean upstanding chap like you?What still alive at twenty-two, Sure, if your throat ’tis hard to slit, Slit your girl’s, and swing for it."

"Like enough, you won't be glad, When they come to hang you, lad: But bacon's not the only thing That's cured by hanging from a string."

"'Tis Summer Time on Bredon, And now the farmers swear: The cattle rise and listen In valleys far and near, And blush at what they hear.But when the mists in autumn On Bredon top are thick, And happy hymns of farmers Go up from fold and rick, The cattle then are sick."

"Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and that no one is alive."

"It is now a period of more than two years since first I saw your inestimable book of Political Justice. It opened to my mind fresh and more extensive views; it materially influenced my character, and I rose from its perusal a wiser and a better man. I was no longer the votary of romance; till then I had existed in an ideal world—now I found that in this universe of ours was enough to excite the interest of the heart, enough to employ the discussions of reason; I beheld, in short, that I had duties to perform. Conceive the effect which the Political Justice would have upon a mind before jealous of its independence, participating somewhat singularly in a peculiar susceptibility."

"Two other general characteristics of rationalist politics may be observed. They are the politics of perfection, and they are the politics of uniformity; either of these characteristics without the other denotes a different style of politics, the essence of rationalism is their combination. The evanescence of imperfection may be said to be the first item of the creed of the Rationalist. He is not devoid of humility; he can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason. But what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems, or a political problem of which there is no 'rational' solution at all. Such a problem must be counterfeit. And the 'rational' solution of any problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution. There is no place in his scheme for a 'best in the circumstances', only a place for 'the best'; because the function of reason is precisely to surmount circumstances. Of course, the Rationalist is not always a perfectionist in general, his mind governed in each occasion by a comprehensive Utopia; but invariably he is a perfectionist in detail. And from this politics of perfection springs the politics of uniformity; a scheme which does not recognize: circumstance can have no place for variety. 'There must in the nature of things be one best form of government which all intellects, sufficiently roused from the slumber of savage ignorance, will be irresistibly incited to approve,' writes Godwin. This intrepid Rationalist states in general what a more modest believer might prefer to assert only in detail; but the principle holds — there may not be one universal remedy for all political ills, but the remedy for any particular ill is as universal in its application as it is rational in its conception. If the rational solution for one of the problems of a society has been determined, to permit any relevant part of the society to escape from the solution is, ex hypotkesi, to countenance irrationality. There can be no place for preference that is not rational preference, and all rational preferences necessarily coincide. Political activity is recognized as the imposition of a uniform condition of perfection upon human conduct."

"What is striking about the population question to our modern eyes is not whether England actually was or was not in danger of petering out as a nation. In retrospect, what is interesting is how harmonious either view of the population problem was with a vision that puts its faith in natural law, reason, and progress. Was the population declining? Then it should be encouraged to grow, as it “naturally” would under the benign auspices of the laws that Adam Smith had shown to be the guiding principles of a free market economy. Was the population growing? All to the good, since everyone agreed that a growing population was a source of national wealth. No matter which way one cut the cake, the result was favorable to an optimistic prognosis for society; or, to put it differently, there was nothing in the population question, as it was understood, to shake men’s faith in their future. Perhaps no one summed up this optimistic outlook so naively and completely as William Godwin. Godwin, a minister and pamphleteer, looked at the heartless world about him and shrank back in dismay. But he looked into the future and what he saw was good. In 1793 he published Political Justice, a book that excoriated the present but gave promise of a distant future in which “there will be no war, no crime, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Besides this there will be no disease, anguish, melancholy, or resentment.” What a wonderful vision! It was, of course, highly subversive, for Godwin’s utopia called for complete equality and for the most thoroughgoing anarchic communism: even the property contract of marriage would be abolished. But in view of the high price of the book (it sold for three guineas) the Privy Council decided not to prosecute the author, and it became the fashion of the day in the aristocratic salons to discuss Mr. Godwin’s daring ideas."

"It was Godwin, in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (2 vols., 1793), who was the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work. Laws, he wrote, are not a product of the wisdom of our ancestors: they are the product of their passions, their timidity, their jealousies and their ambition. The remedy they offer is worse than the evils they pretend to cure. If and only if all laws and courts were abolished, and the decisions in the arising contests were left to reasonable men chosen for that purpose, real justice would gradually be evolved. As to the state, Godwin frankly claimed its abolition. A society, he wrote, can perfectly well exist without any government: only the communities should be small and perfectly autonomous. Speaking of property, he stated that the rights of every one ‘to every substance capable of contributing to the benefit of a human being’ must be regulated by justice alone: the substance must go ‘to him who most wants it’. His conclusion was communism. Godwin, however, had not the courage to maintain his opinions. He entirely rewrote later on his chapter on property and mitigated his communist views in the second edition of Political Justice (8 vols., 1796)."

"I have finished Godwin. His work [Enquiry Concerning Political Justice] cannot be too highly praised. All mankind are indebted to the author. The cause of despotism never met a more formidable adversary. He goes to the root of every evil that now plagues man and degrades him almost beneath the savage beast. He shows the source whence all the misfortunes of mankind flow. That source he demonstrates to be political government."

"The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern."

"Portable Enlightenment Reader, p. 478-479"

"I did not hate the author of my misfortunes — truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved — and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me — to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer."

"Simplify the social system, in the manner which every motive, but those of usurpation and ambition, powerfully recommends; render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity; remove the necessity of implicit faith; and we may expect the whole species to become reasonable and virtuous."

"Anarchy, in its own nature, is an evil of short duration. The more horrible are the mischiefs it inflicts, the more does it hasten to a close."

"Nothing can be of more importance than to separate prejudice and mistake on the one hand from reason and demonstration on the other."

"The Spirit of the Age was never more fully shown than in its treatment of this writer — its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. Five-and twenty years ago he was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off. Now he has sunk below the horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. Mr. Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame. His bark, after being tossed in the revolutionary tempest, now raised to heaven by all the fury of popular breath, now almost dashed in pieces, and buried in the quicksands of ignorance, or scorched with the lightning of momentary indignation, at length floats on the calm wave that is to bear it down the stream of time. Mr. Godwin's person is not known, he is not pointed out in the street, his conversation is not courted his opinions are not asked, he is at the head of no cabal, he belongs to no party in the State, he has no train of admirers, no one thinks it worth his while even to traduce and vilify him, he has scarcely friend or foe the world make a point (as Goldsmith used to say) of taking no more notice of him than if such an individual had never existed; he is to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and buried. But the author of Political Justice and of Caleb Wiliams can never die; his name is an abstraction in letters; his works are standard in the history of intellect."

"Privilege is a regulation rendering a few men, and those only, by the accident of their birth, eligible to certain situations. It kills all liberal ambition in the rest of mankind, by opposing to it an apparently insurmountable bar. It diminishes it in the favored class itself, by showing them the principal qualification as indefeasibly theirs. Privilege entitles a favored few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons; it puts into the hands of those few the means of oppression against the rest of their species; it fill them witth vain-glory, and affords them every incitement to insolence and a lofty disregard to the feeling and interests of others."

"Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of distinction and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude."

"The case of mere titles is so absurd that it would deserve to be treated only with ridicule were t not for the serious mischief they impose on mankind. The feudal system was a ferocious monster, devouring, where it came, all that the friend of humanity regards with attachment and love. The system of titles appears under a different form. The monster is at length destroyed, and they who followed in his train, and fattened upon the carcasses of those he slew, have stuffed his skin, and, b exhibiting it, hope still to terrify mankind into patient and pusillanimity."

"It is false that kings are entitled to the eminence they obtain. They possess no intrinsic superiority over their subjects. The line of distinction that is drawn is the offspring of pretense, an indirect means employed for effecting certain purposes, and not the language of truth. It tramples upon the genuine nature of things, and depends for its support upon this argument, 'that, were it not for impositions of a similar nature, mankind would be miserable.'"

"Till mankind be satisfied with the naked statement of what they really perceive, till they confess virtue to be then most illustrious, when she more disdains the aid of ornament, they will never arrive at that manly justice of sentiment at which they seem destined one day to arrive. By his scheme of naked virtue will be every day a gainer; every succeeding observer willl more fully do her justice, while vice, deprived of that varnish with which she delighted to glow her actions of that gaudy exhibition which may be made alike by every pretender will speedily sink into unheeded contempt."

"Democracy is a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more."