Essayists From England

"It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love."

"His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end."

"He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it."

"Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express."

"You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies."

"Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow."

"… and catholics give out forgiveness at the same time politicians give out promises and whores give out."

"Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair that when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother."

"..and the devil won another easy hand in God's poker game."

"… dressed all in yellow spreading warmth and the promise of sex."

"A past tense, future perfect kind of night."

"But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not."

"Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dot's enthusiast's wet dream."

"He traced the genealogy of the feeling"

"The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned to heaven."

"You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."

"His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out."

"As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with "good writing" without limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother, and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and Ozick. Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count."

"The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie."

"Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature. They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies."

"This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love."

"He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice."

"Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself."

"People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?"

"However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

"If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the word ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question, How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayam's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life."

"The influence of Carlyle was on the whole in favour of authoritarianism; and the teaching of Matthew Arnold ran the same way. But while Carlyle sought the aid of authority to realise divine justice, Arnold enlisted authority to defend the sweetness and light of culture against the tasteless riot of an individualistic age. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) it is the artist rather than the moralist who is in revolt against “Manchesterdom”; and Arnold is in this sense the fellow of Ruskin and Morris. But he lays his finger more definitely than his successors on a central fact of English politics—the English inability, partly due to long centuries of Dissent, partly due to the economics of laissez-faire, to form any idea of the State, “the nation in its collective and corporate capacity controlling as government the full swing of its members in the name of the higher reason of all.” In order to enthrone right reason, Arnold argues for the rule neither of the aristocracy of barbarians, nor of the middle class of philistines, nor of the populace, but of an authority which represents our best selves made perfect by culture. Where such an authority may be found he will not decide; he lays his main emphasis on the duty of attaining self-perfection through culture in order to make such an authority possible."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern."

"And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else."

"But when he argues for an authoritative centre, like an Academy, in the field of literature; when he urges that representative government issues in pandering to the populace instead of the rule of right reason; when he praises the work done by an absolute monarchy in Prussia for the cause of education, his inclination seems clear. In the name of good taste or right reason he seeks an authority which will not pander to the bad taste of any class, and which must therefore presumably, be non-representative; and it is difficult to see where such an authority can be found except in a sort of absolute monarchy. Arnold would have instantly denied that he sought anything of this order; he would have treated the idea with elusive and delicate irony; and yet this is the one logical issue of his teaching."

"The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can."

"It is observable that Matthew Arnold, the eldest son, and the author of the volume of poems to which you allude, inherits his mother's defect. Striking and prepossessing in appearance, his manner displeased from its seeming foppery. I own it caused me at first to regard him with regretful surprise; the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative. I was told, however, that "Mr. Arnold improved upon acquaintance." So it was: ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit, and some genuine intellectual aspirations, as well as high educational acquirements, displaced superficial affectations. I was given to understand that his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, and indeed he betrayed as much in the course of conversation."

"Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium."

"The men of culture are the true apostles of equality."

"The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”"

"Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves."

"The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light."

"I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture."

"Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

"The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience."

"Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration."

"Radiant with ardour divine! Beacons of Hope ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow."

"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically."

"What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?— Most men eddy about Here and there—eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl’d in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die— Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell’d, Foam’d for a moment, and gone."

"Therefore to thee it was given Many to save with thyself; And, at the end of thy day, O faithful shepherd! to come, Bringing thy sheep in thy hand."

"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly."

"One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it."