Playwrights From England

"The novels are remarkable for a very sensitive and exact observation of life as well as for purity of style. By temperament and perhaps also by his artistic conscience Galsworthy avoided many appeals to a reader's sympathy which seemed to him not consistent with objective truth. He belonged to no political party and professed to have no political convictions."

"There can be no question that your admirable play [Justice] bore a most important part in creating that atmosphere of sympathy and interest which is so noticeable upon this subject at the present time."

"The Man of Property has the elements of a very great novel, a very great satire. It sets out to reveal the social being in all his strength and inferiority. But the author has not the courage to carry it through. The greatness of the book rests in its new and sincere and amazingly profound satire. It is the ultimate satire on modern humanity, and done from the inside, with really consummate skill and sincere creative passion, something quite new. It seems to be a real effort to show up the social being in all his weirdness. And then it fizzles out."

"But when we have said that In Chancery is not a great novel, we would assure our readers that it is a fascinating, brilliant book."

"Everything known before it happens; and headlines twice the size of the events."

"How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about."

"Will you let me take this opportunity of saying how much I enjoyed and admired your play Strife. It is a fine piece of work which will long survive the silly chatter of the day."

"Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place — service — social service — the ants' creed, the bees' creed."

"I greatly admire the keen and vigorous way in which you are driving forward a good cause. I am in entire sympathy with your general mood."

"I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And there came to me this thought: What is this Universe — that never had beginning and will never have an end — but a myriad striving to perfect pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that all form one great perfected picture? And what are we — ripples on the tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose — but little works of Art?"

"Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky! For who would live so petty and unblest That dare not tilt at something ere he die; Rather than, screened by safe majority, Preserve his little life to little end, And never raise a rebel cry!"

"God save the pennon, ragged to the dawn, That signs to moon to stand, and sun to fly; And flutters when the weak is overborne To stem the tide of fate and certainty. That knows not reason, and that seeks no fame —So! Undismayed beneath the serried clouds, Raise up the banner of forlorn defence — A jest to the complacency of crowds — Bright-haloed with the one diviner sense: To hold itself as nothing to itself; And in the quest of its imagined star To lose all thought of after-recompense!"

"This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that which not every one will admit is that this Creative Purpose works in its fashioning, not only of matter but of what we call spirit, through friction, through the rubbing together of the thoughts and the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet, the heat or friction within it, remains favorable to human life, there will be, there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of humanity, through the ever increasing friction of human spirits one with the other; friction supplied by life itself, and next after life, by those transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know as art."

"Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help others. In breadth of heart are founded justice, love, sacrifice; without it there would be no special meaning to any of our efforts, and the tale of all human life would be still no more than that of supremely gifted animals, many of whose communities are highly efficient, and have instinctive unity founded on experience of its utility, but none of that conscious altruism which is without perception of future benefit to self, and works from sheer recognition of its own beauty. In sum, human civilization is the outgrowth of conscious altruism; and the directive Moral Purpose in the world nothing but our dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all bound more and more toward the understanding of ourselves and each other, and all that this carries with it."

"The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage."

"My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody."

"What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered — 'Wilkie! have a mission.'"

"He is very suggestive, and exceeding quick to take my notions. Being industrious and reliable besides, I don't think we should be at an additional expense of £20 in the year..."

"I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man."

"Your tears come easy , when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it."

"We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast."

"Rosanna Spearman had been a thief, and not being of the sort that get up Companies in the City, and rob from thousands, instead of only robbing from one, the law laid hold of her, and the prison and the reformatory followed the lead of the law."

"Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way."

"I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves."

"The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason"

"No man under Heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace — they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship — they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel."

"Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death."

"I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change—to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are."

"A very remarkable work... in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman."

"The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared."

"I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day."

"People who read stories are said to have excitable brains."

"Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women."

"We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality."

"Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper."

"Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service."

"It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over."

"There have been a good many funny things said and written about hardupishness, but the reality is not funny, for all that. It is not funny to have to haggle over pennies. It isn't funny to be thought mean and stingy. It isn't funny to be shabby and to be ashamed of your address. No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty — to the poor."

"All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men — more so, if possible."

"It is not the actual discomforts themselves that are hard to bear. Who would mind roughing it a bit if that were all it meant? What cared Robinson Crusoe for a patch on his trousers? Did he wear trousers? I forget; or did he go about as he does in the pantomimes? What did it matter to him if his toes did stick out of his boots? and what if his umbrella was a cotton one, so long as it kept the rain off? His shabbiness did not trouble him; there was none of his friends round about to sneer him. Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting."

"I don't believe any man ever existed without vanity, and if he did he would be an extremely uncomfortable person to have anything to do with. He would, of course, be a very good man, and we should respect him very much. He would be a very admirable man—a man to be put under a glass case and shown round as a specimen—a man to be stuck upon a pedestal and copied, like a school exercise—a man to be reverenced, but not a man to be loved, not a human brother whose hand we should care to grip. Angels may be very excellent sort of folk in their way, but we, poor mortals, in our present state, would probably find them precious slow company. Even mere good people are rather depressing. It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one."

"It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one."

"Tears are as sweet as laughter to some natures."

"And who would not risk its terrors to gain its raptures? Ah, what raptures they were! The mere recollection thrills you. How delicious it was to tell her that you loved her, that you lived for her, that you would die for her! How you did rave, to be sure, what floods of extravagant nonsense you poured forth, and oh, how cruel it was of her to pretend not to believe you! In what awe you stood of her! How miserable you were when you had offended her! And yet, how pleasant to be bullied by her and to sue for pardon without having the slightest notion of what your fault was! How dark the world was when she snubbed you, as she often did, the little rogue, just to see you look wretched; how sunny when she smiled! How jealous you were of every one about her! How you hated every man she shook hands with, every woman she kissed—the maid that did her hair, the boy that cleaned her shoes, the dog she nursed—though you had to be respectful to the last-named! How you looked forward to seeing her, how stupid you were when you did see her, staring at her without saying a word! How impossible it was for you to go out at any time of the day or night without finding yourself eventually opposite her windows!"

"A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's."

"No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty—to the poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive man; and many a brave gentleman who would have faced the labors of Hercules has had his heart broken by its petty miseries."

"And how madly we did worship! And how sweet it was to worship! Ah, lad, cherish love's young dream while it lasts! You will know too soon how truly little Tom Moore sang when he said that there was nothing half so sweet in life. Even when it brings misery it is a wild, romantic misery, all unlike the dull, worldly pain of after-sorrows. When you have lost her—when the light is gone out from your life and the world stretches before you a long, dark horror, even then a half-enchantment mingles with your despair."

"There are various ways of flattering, and, of course, you must adapt your style to your subject. Some people like it laid on with a trowel, and this requires very little art. With sensible persons, however, it needs to be done very delicately, and more by suggestion than actual words. A good many like it wrapped up in the form of an insult, as—"Oh, you are a perfect fool, you are. You would give your last sixpence to the first hungry-looking beggar you met;" while others will swallow it only when administered through the medium of a third person, so that if C wishes to get at an A of this sort, he must confide to A's particular friend B that he thinks A a splendid fellow, and beg him, B, not to mention it, especially to A. Be careful that B is a reliable man, though, otherwise he won't."

"Poor little Angelina, too, sheds silent tears, for Edwin has given up carrying her old handkerchief in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. Both are astonished at the falling off in the other one, but neither sees their own change. If they did they would not suffer as they do. They would look for the cause in the right quarter—in the littleness of poor human nature—join hands over their common failing, and start building their house anew on a more earthly and enduring foundation. But we are so blind to our own shortcomings, so wide awake to those of others. Everything that happens to us is always the other person's fault. Angelina would have gone on loving Edwin forever and ever and ever if only Edwin had not grown so strange and different. Edwin would have adored Angelina through eternity if Angelina had only remained the same as when he first adored her. It is a cheerless hour for you both when the lamp of love has gone out and the fire of affection is not yet lit, and you have to grope about in the cold, raw dawn of life to kindle it. God grant it catches light before the day is too far spent. Many sit shivering by the dead coals till night come."

"I am afraid, dear Edwin and Angelina, you expect too much from love. You think there is enough of your little hearts to feed this fierce, devouring passion for all your long lives. Ah, young folk! don't rely too much upon that unsteady flicker. It will dwindle and dwindle as the months roll on, and there is no replenishing the fuel. You will watch it die out in anger and disappointment. To each it will seem that it is the other who is growing colder. Edwin sees with bitterness that Angelina no longer runs to the gate to meet him, all smiles and blushes; and when he has a cough now she doesn't begin to cry and, putting her arms round his neck, say that she cannot live without him. The most she will probably do is to suggest a lozenge, and even that in a tone implying that it is the noise more than anything else she is anxious to get rid of."