Essayists From England

"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."

"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 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."

"This is it: "There are two words for everything." Surely that is wisdom! The whole theory of party politics is in it, for one thing; and indeed all argument."

"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."

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

""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."

"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."

"I hate to be reminded of the passage of time, and in a garden of flowers one can never escape from it. It is one of the charms of a garden of grass and evergreens, that there for a while one is allowed to hug the illusion that time tarries."

"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."

"She doesn't love you because of anything — she loves. She doesn't care whether you are handsome or ugly, or old or young, or cruel or kind, or strong or weak, or conceited Or humble, whether you drop your h's, or have nothing in the bank — those things are beside the mark, because she loves."

"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."

"I walked back by way of the sea-lions' enclosure to refresh my eyes with the King Penguin's perfect ecclesiastical tailoring. He was pacing moodily about as usual, in what one felt to be the interval between a marriage ceremony and a funeral service. Much better, I thought, to have left the £2000 a year to him. No harm would then be done, and what perfect episcopal garden-parties he could give with it!"

"Whereas so many writers who are " different " seem to be merely straining away from the conventional in their originality, Mrs. Woolf transcends it easily: she has a running lyric strain that lifts the heart. The fairies showered gifts on Mr. Forster; sympathy, wit, knowledge, charm; but an impudent fairy came at the end and made him whimsical. Lovely as his work is, it remains at one remove from life."

"I was one of the first in this country—I rather think I was quite the first—to hail in print the genius of Mr. Joyce, when, many years ago, he put forth a quiet little volume of short stories called " ." I saw in his bleak and bitter realism a reading of life."

"The civilisation and social structure of our country, rightly or wrongly, take for granted that a few people shall have a lot of money and a lot of power, and great many people very little money and very little power. But the individuals, and particularly the labouring individuals, who create and compose our civilisation and society, are beginning to cease to take this state of things for granted."

"They kept a bird— Poor bird !—in a cage ; Till—so I have heard— Without need, without rage, Cheerfully, coldly, They let it flit, And more than boldly Murdered it. Since the law of nature Is danger and pain, The obedient creature Did not complain, But left as token to everybody The wing broken And the breast bloody."

"... , years before he died, was hidden from most of us in the mist of his own method."

"" Instinct," as said, " is a great matter "; but it is not the whole. believes so much in domination and antagonism that he seems not to believe in men and women—the first act of faith that God requires of the artist."

"Gerald Gould was important in George Orwell’s life although they may never have met. As Chief Reader for the publisher Victor Gollancz in the early 1930’s Gould was involved in editing Orwell’s early books. On 17 December 1934 Orwell wrote a letter to about possible changes to '; and listed sixteen changes that Gould, and Harold Frederick Rubenstein, a solicitor, playwright, author and literary critic, had recommended. Orwell made some changes, compromised over others and stood firm on some points."

"Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth."

"The true delight of travel, the one that is going to print itself unaccountably and indelibly on you, seems to prefer to come as a thief in the night, and not at the hours you specially fix for its entertainment."

"What I mean by reading is not skimming, not being able to say as the world saith, "Oh, yes, I've read that!," but reading again and again, in all sorts of moods, with an increase of delight every time, till the thing read has become a part of your system and goes forth along with you to meet any new experience you may have."

"Mr. Montague has written a very fine book. He has extenuated nothing and set down nothing in malice. I have seen no book about the war so temperate or so human. He was in the war, and being a man of fine intelligence must have suffered more than most from the fools from whom men then had to suffer, but the book is without any littleness or bitterness.... It is one of the very best of the books which have been written about the war."

"Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used to keep your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of some more innocent person."

"War hath no fury like a non-combatant."

"It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again."

"All of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about “the public school spirit”, our gallant, robust contempt for “swats” and “smugs” and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will – we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see it again – a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps of twenty thousand men."

"We all see more of architecture than of any other art. Every street is a gallery of architects’ work, and in most streets, whatever their age, there is good work and bad. Through these amusing shows many of us walk unperceivingly, all our days, like illiterates in a library, so richly does the fashionable education provide us with blind sides ."

"We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb."

"Come little babe, come silly soul, Thy father’s shame, thy mother’s grief, Born as I doubt to all our dole, And to thyself unhappy chief: Sing lullaby, and lap it warm, Poor soul that thinks no creature harm."

"I wish my deadly foe, no worse Than want of friends, and empty purse."

"In the merry month of May, In a morn by break of day, Forth I walk’d by the wood-side Whenas May was in his pride: There I spièd all alone Phillida and Coridon."

"Churton Collins ... was certainly not the man to grow enthusiastic over every " new thing " that might might loom above the literary horizon. He more often confronted novelty from the peak of than of . Yet it was Churton Collins who alligned with Dante and Milton, and declared that " no poet has made his début with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.""

"All sensible people agree in thinking that large seminaries of young ladies, though managed with all the vigilance and caution which human abilities can exert, are in danger of great corruption."

"That learning belongs not to the female character, and that the female mind is not capable of a degree of improvement equal to that of the other sex, are narrow and unphilosophical prejudices."

"Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?"

"He was no coward, but it had suddenly struck him that the present was a very ill-chosen time for a row with his younger relative, however successful might be the issue. Such violence should not go unpunished, but vengeance is a dish that can be eaten cold."

"I had never had a piece of toast Particularly long and wide, But fell upon the sanded floor, And always on the buttered side."

"Love and a cottage! Eh, Fanny! Ah, give me indifference and a coach and six!"

"To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery."

"May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of the aid that shall never come, ere the God of the poor take him into his hand."

"To the truly benevolent mind, indeed, nothing is more satisfactory than to hear of a miser denying himself the necessaries of life a little too far and ridding us of his presence altogether."

"... If you're a writer who works in biographies, you discover that that the people you're writing about aren't very nice. Not always. Sometimes they're wonderful."

"At the age of 39 I was fairly sure I would spend the rest of my life alone. I lived alone, I worked alone. No matter what I did, or who I dated, I didn’t seem to be able to find the relationship I longed for. ... Ian was nearly three decades older than me, but all the same we quickly became friends. We were both passionate gardeners, and we’d take tours around our patches, pointing out the plants we were most proud of. ... We didn’t just love each other. We were in love with each other. We were the foundation of each other’s lives. We decided to get married that summer. Suddenly there was no time to waste. ... ... I used to worry I’d never meet anyone and now I live in terror of Ian’s death. He’s the same age as my parents; I know it’s likely that I’ll lose them all at around the same time, a loss so cataclysmic I can barely begin to fathom it. I worry about my sweet husband vanishing into the blind alleys of dementia. I worry about blood clots, bowel cancer, a heart attack, a stroke."

"… If some of England’s seemingly sublime gardens were economically dependent on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of America and the West Indies, others were contingent upon the practice of , the legal process of taking the formerly open fields, commons and wasteland of the medieval period into private ownership."

"... What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don't find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us together, or trap us behind screens?"

"Her mouth, which a smile, Devoid of all guile, Half opens to view, Is the bud of the rose In the morning that blows, Impearl’d with the dew.More fragrant her breath Than the flow’r-scented heath At the dawning of day; The hawthorn in bloom, The lily’s perfume, Or the blossoms of may."

"Richard Cobb has long since proved himself incapable of writing history that is either orthodox or dull. Whether his subject is the French Revolution or the twentieth-century scene, his work bears the stamp of an idiosyncratic spirit; he is always present, an erudite and ironic tour guide, inviting us to poke into nooks and crannies of the past and evoking the shades of people and events from his own experience."

"Richard Cobb's new book is a valuable and highly original addition to the growing volume of studies now being devoted to the French Revolution as seen 'from below'. No other writer in the field has so extensive a knowledge of the sources, Parisian and provincial, none has the same degree of wide-ranging erudition; moreover, the book is presented in the highly personal style with which Cobb's readers have become familiar: pugnacious, witty, irascible, irreverent, tendentious, impressionistic, and shot through with occasional passages of arresting brilliance. The familiar bêtes noires are here again: sociology, economic historians, 'scientific' history, Robespierre ('the Pope of the Supreme Being'); and a new and greater villian is added to round off the list: Napoleon, whose Empire is described 'France's most appalling régime'. In short, the reader, even though his hackles occasionally rise, will never be bored and is most likely to be both entertained and instructed."