Novelists From England

"Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments."

"If Milton had written in Italian, he would have been, in my opinion, the most perfect poet in modern languages; for his own strength of thought would have condensed and hardened that speech to a proper degree."

"We must speak to the eyes, if we wish to affect the mind."

"I have sometimes thought that a squire and a vestry were a king and republic in miniature. The vestry is as tyrannic, in its way, as the squire in his. Any power necessarily leads to abuses of that power. It is difficult to stop any impetus of nature."

"Mr. Hollis is always publishing republican books, and yet professes great veneration for our constitution. I cannot reconcile this; our constitution being, in its leading part, an oligarchy, the form, perhaps, of all others, the most opposite to a republic."

"I visit Paris often, and have considerably studied the French character. In individuals it is often excellent; but taken in general it disgusts by its petulance and vanity. The French have always been dissolute in their amours; and are thus led to assail the chastity of foreign women, the most unpardonable of all affronts to fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers. This, and their petulant overbearing conduct, prevent their conquests from being lasting. Yes, I swear to you by the Sicilian vespers, they can never be of much duration."

"A fig for our democrats! [1792]. Barking dogs never bite. The danger in France arose from silent and instantaneous action. They said nothing, and did every thing—ours say every thing, and will do nothing."

"William, Duke of Cumberland, gave promises of talents that were never accomplished. One day he had given some offence to his royal mother, and was remanded to the confinement of his chamber. After what the queen thought a sufficient duration of his punishment, she sent for him. He returned in a very sullen humour. "What have you been doing?" said the queen.—"Reading."—"What book?"—"The New Testament."—"Very well. What part?"—"Where it is said, Woman, why troublest thou me?""

"Sir Robert Walpole used to say, that it was fortunate so few men could be prime ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking wickedness of mankind. I never heard him say, that all men have their prices; and I believe no such expression ever came from his mouth."

"Lord Bute was my schoolfellow. He was a man of taste and science, and I do believe his intentions were good. He wished to blend and unite all parties. The Tories were willing to come in for a share of power, after having been so long excluded—but the Whigs were not willing to grant that share. Power is an intoxicating draught; the more a man has, the more he desires."

"Lord Bolingbroke discovered a foible of the great duke of Marlborough, that he delighted in tying Miss Jenning's garters. When he repeated the story, he used to add, "What is known to women is known to the world.""

"These horrible affairs in France are the offspring of fanaticism. Yes, sir; if the reformation had taken place there, as well as here, religion and the clergy would have been respected, as they are here. Fanatics make atheists. If I cannot believe in God without believing that a wafer is God, my reason abjures the deity. I wish religion to exist: it is of infinite use to society, and I therefore wish it to be as rational as possible. A synod of the English church might order several objectionable tenets and expressions of our worship to be altered. I love those reformations that prevent revolutions, by keeping pace with the gradual progress of reason and knowledge."

"The Americans are mostly engaged in trade and plantations. Their chief object is to make money. And, in truth, money is freedom."

"“My councils do not need a Friar’s intervention,” said Manfred; “and of all men living is that hoary traitor the only one whom you delight to confer with?”"

"Thy purpose is as odious as thy resentment is contemptible."

"You think me ambitious: ambition, alas! is composed of more rugged materials. If I were ambitious, I should not for so many years have been a prey to all the hell of conscientious scruples."

"“Heaven,” replied Manfred, “does not send Heralds to question the title of a lawful Prince. I doubt whether it even notifies its will through Friars—but that is your affair, not mine."

"And is anybody unhappy about another, unless they are in love with them?"

"Have done with this rhapsody of impertinence."

"“Peace, simpleton!” said the Princess. “Though he said he was unhappy, it does not follow that he must be in love.”"

"Manfred was not one of those savage tyrants who wanton in cruelty unprovoked. The circumstances of his fortune had given an asperity to his temper, which was naturally humane; and his virtues were always ready to operate, when his passions did not obscure his reason."

"He was my counsel in affairs, was my oracle in taste, the standard to whom I submitted my trifles, and the genius that presided over poor Strawberry."

"Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent."

"He turned then to Job, again using the King James's version. The translation from the Hebrew was narrower than the Greek but seemed more essential. It was the simple strong prose of men who believed and who were unafraid to name things."

"Too much philosophy makes men mad."

"In Robert's experience there were two kinds of classicists, the mad and the disconcertingly sane."

""But men still shoot each other, don't they?" I asked hopefully."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"This is I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason."

"Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d'etre of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath."

"I remember walking to the cricket ground with the team, sometimes trying to feel, and sometimes trying not to feel, that I was one of them; and the conviction I had, which comes so quickly to a boy, that nothing in the world mattered except that we should win."

"I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (`Out of the question,' Toni assured me, `they're so badly written they must be authentic')."

"You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vague Deutscher all hot for Truthspiel."

"I caught glimpses of white-clad figures striding purposefully to and fro, heard men's voices calling each other in tones of authority and urgency, as if life had suddenly become more serious, as if battle were in prospect."

""I might go for a walk." Even to me this sounded a pedestrian thing to do."

"To Morris we owe poetry whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision has not been excelled in the literature of our country, and by the revival of the decorative arts he has given to our individualised romantic movement the social idea and the social factor also."

"William Morris pleaded well for simplicity as the basis of all true art. Let us understand the significance to art of that word — SIMPLICITY — for it is vital to the Art of the Machine."

"... above the confusion of these memories two figures remain distinct. Mr. Bernard Shaw, physically individualized with extraordinary decision, a frequent speaker, and always explicit and careful to make himself misunderstood; and the grand head, the rough voice, the sturdy figure, sedulously plain speech, and lovable bearing of William Morris."

"So far Morris is the true prophet of the 20th century. We owe it to him that an ordinary man's dwelling-house has once more become a worthy object of the architect's thought, and a chair, a wallpaper, or a vase, a worthy object of the artist's imagination."

"He is beaten gold."

"So he still paces ahead of us, no longer ‘lonely’ but still in the van — beckoning us forward to the measureless bounty of life. He is one of those men whom history will never overtake."

"Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper."

"Young ladies may have been crossed in love, and have had their sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful nights, and so forth; but it is only in very sentimental novels that people occupy themselves perpetually with that passion; and, I believe, what are called broken hearts are very rare articles indeed."

"It was William Morris who in modern times first joined these two words [bookmaking and art] together by the publication of his magnificent Kelmscott volumes. Such type, such decorations, such presswork, such sheer, composite beauty! ... from the very beginning Morris' innovations showed the world that printing still belonged among the fine arts."

"It is Morris... who can properly be called the first English Marxist. This truth has been but slowly recognised, not only by the reformists and anarchists who each, in their own fashion, have tried to annex him, but also by Marxists."

"News from Nowhere was one of Voltairine de Cleyre's favorite books"

"William Morris's News from Nowhere, an anarchist utopian novel in which women possess both equality and a natural predilection for the tasks of domesticity...Morris, along with a host of other nineteenth-century men, obviously believed that to engage in the role of helpmeet, to cook, to clean, and to run a house were natural female functions. Therefore, women of his utopia did not consider such duties evidence of inequality."

"We need a return to the William Morris broad conception of art in relation to life, in terms of colours and designs and craftsmanship, and windows opening on to Heaven, instead of narrowing it down to the preciosities of cliques and coteries who seek through their obscurities to keep art esoteric."

"Where Morris beats the cerebral utopists all hollow is in the materiality of his imagination. To lead a decent human life in a cramped, featureless, unvaried environment is a tough job; the twenty-story-slab housing development, the hundred-cubicle office, the windows that cannot be opened because the interior "climate" is controlled, the faceless Bauhaus exterior-all utopian in their way, I guess. But not my utopia, or his."

"My great author at this period was William Morris...I found The Well at the World's End. I looked—I read chapter headings—I dipped—and next day I was off into town to buy a copy of my own. Like so many new steps it appeared to be partly a revival- 'Knights in Armour' returning from a very early period of my childhood. After that I read all the Morris I could get, Jason, The Earthly Paradise, the prose romances. The growth of the new delight is marked by my sudden realisation, almost with a sense of disloyalty, that the letters WILLIAM MORRIS were coming to have at least as potent a magic in them as WAGNER."