Essayists From England

"Self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme."

"Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The Devil always builds a chapel there; And 'twill be found, upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation."

"Women, in my observation, have little or no difference in them, but as they are or are not distinguished by education."

"To know Trade then is to know the World: And I may farther observe, That if any one Nation could govern Trade, that Nation would govern the World; could it give Laws to the Commerce, it would give Laws to the People, and the whole World would be its Dependents and Subjects."

"Let us see in a few Words what Nature and Providence has done for us; nay, what they have done for us exclusive of the rest of the World. The Bounty of Heaven has stor'd us with the Principles of Commerce, fruitful of a vast variety of Things essential to Trade, and which call upon us as it were in the Voice of Nature, bidding us work, and with annex'd Encouragement to do so from the visible apparent Success of Industry. Here the Voice of the World, is plain, like the Answer of an Oracle, thus Dig and Find, Plow and Reap, Fish and Take, Spin and Live; in a word, Trade and Thrive; and this with such extraordinary Circumstances, that it is as if there was a Bar upon the neighbouring Nations, and it had been spoken from Heaven thus: These are for you only, and not for any other Nation; you, my Favourites, of England; you singled out to be great, opulent, powerful, above all your Neighbours, and to be made so by your own Industry and my Bounty."

"I cannot believe that God ever design'd the Riches of the World to be useless to the World; that the Gold, the Silver, the Diamonds, and other Species of such Immense Worth and Value, was ever created in the Bowels of the Mountains, and the most hidden Parts of the World to lye buried there, and remain unprofitable, till they come to be melted down again in the General Conflagration."

"The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human knowledge."

"From this amphibious ill-born mob began That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman."

"For Englishmen are ne'er contented long."

"Like Eden Fruitful, like Arabia Gay, So blest, they scarcely know for what to pray; England in native Glory ever springs; A Country fitted for the View of Kings."

"Some pre-Socratic “Greek” thinking conceived of the world as a composite whole made up of indivisible parts (atoms) and so searched for a basic “stuff” at bottom. Conway suggests that the distinctions composite/indivisible, whole/part be collapsed without abandoning the pre-Socratic process of division. Divide a whole and you are left not with parts, but with wholes. In this sense, nothing is more “basic” than anything else. Plato and Parmenides began with the One not “at bottom,” but “at top.” The problem is not how to get a whole out of a bunch of parts, but how to account for the diversity of “wholes” without sacrificing unity. Perfect freedom would consist in perfect determination — perfect identification of wholes: hence, the idea of “conformity to God’s will” and the Quaker ideal of simplicity. Sequentially, there is a time and place where/ when “simpler” structures exist and more “complex” structures do not — but atemporally (and from the perspective of the whole) all simply exists. Reading back from that perspective (as Plato and Parmenides attempt to do), the“end” may be seen as informing the “beginning” and the “middle.” If Plato worked backward from the “end” and Democritus worked forward from the “beginning,” Conway worked outward from the middle — and this is the place Leibniz mapped in his comment to Burnett. Since the middle is the one place we can be, it is most assuredly a more secure place to start than the“end” or the “beginning,” where we cannot."

"Anne Conway embraces the fundamental tenet of the occult philosophers that God was not a vindictive Father who wanted to punish his children for their failings. God damned no one; at most, people damned themselves by turning their backs on God, whose infinite love was freely available to everyone. From the end of the seventeenth century, occultists like Lady Conway and Jane Lead, representative of early modern occultism, were extending this belief into universal salvation. God not only wanted to save everyone, eventually he would succeed in doing so."

"My philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway, and hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes—all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists."

"I perceive and bless God for it, that my Lady Conway was my Lady Conway to her last Breath; the greatest Example of Patience and Presence of Mind, in highest Extremities of Pain and Affliction, that we shall easily meet with: Scarce any thing to be found like her since the Primitive times of the Church."

"She distinguishes three distinct kinds of being, God, Christ, and creation, which are differentiable from each other chiefly with respect to changeability — God is utterly unchangeable, Christ is changeable only for the better, and hence forms a necessary mediation between God and creation, and creatures are changeable for better or for worse. With respect to creatures, this feature has the result than any creature could in principle be transformed into any other. Lady Conway goes so far as to claim that there is no difference in kind between body and spirit, that even though in each creature there is a passive principle and an active one, the difference is only in degree not in kind."

"I say, life and figure are distinct attributes of one substance, and as one and the same body may be transmuted into all kinds of figures; and as the perfecter figure comprehends that which is more imperfect; so one and the same body may be transmuted from one degree of life to another more perfect, which always comprehends in it the inferior. We have an example of figure in a triangular prism, which is the first figure of all right lined solid triangular prism, which is the first figure of all right lined solid bodies, where into a body is convertible; and from this into a cube, which is a perfecter figure, and comprehends in it a prism; from a cube it may be turned into a more perfect figure, which comes nearer to a globe, and from this into another, which is yet nearer; and so it ascends from one figure, more imperfect to another more perfect, ad infinitum; for here are no bounds; nor can it be said, this body cannot be changed into a perfecter figure: But the meaning is that that body consists of plane right lines; and this is always chageablee into a perfecter figure, and yet can never reach to the perfection of a globe, although it always approaches nearer unto it; the case is the same in diverse degrees of life, which have indeed a beginning, but no end; so that the creature is always capable of a farther and perfecter degree of life, ad infinitum, and yet can never attain to be equal with God; for he is still infinitely more perfect than a creature, in its highest elevation or perfection, even as a globe is the most perfect of all other figures, unto which none can approach."

"The framework of Conway's system is a tripartite ontological hierarchy of ‘species’, the highest of which is God, the source of all being. Christ, or ‘middle nature’, links God and the third species, called ‘Creature’. God as the most perfect being is infinitely good, wise and just. A principle of likeness links God and creation. Since God is good and just, his creation too is good and just. Created substance, like God, consists of spirit, but, unlike God, is constituted of particles called monads. All created substance is living, capable of motion and perception Anne Conway denies the existence of material body as such, arguing that inert corporeal substance would contradict the nature of God, who is life itself. Incorporeal created substance is, however, differentiated from the divine, principally on account of its mutability and multiplicity even so, the infinite number and constant mutability of created monads constitute an obverse reflection of the unity, infinity, eternity and unchangeableness of God. The continuum between God and creatures is made possible through ‘middle nature’, an intermediary being, through which God communicates life, action, goodness and justice. ‘Middle nature’, partakes of the nature of both God and creation, and is therefore both a bridge and a buffer between God and created things. Thus, although she conceives of created substance as a continuum, and understands mutability as capacity for increased perfection, she sought to avoid the charge of pantheism."

"She explains evil as a falling away from the perfection of God, and understands suffering as part of a longer term process of spiritual recovery. She denies the eternity of hell, since for God to punish finite wrong-doing with infinite and eternal hell punishment would be manifestly unjust and therefore a contradiction of the divine nature. Instead she explains pain and suffering as purgative, with the ultimate aim of restoring creatures to moral and metaphysical perfection."

"It is not an exaggeration if one claims that The Strange Necessity and The Common Reader of Virginia Woolf are the two finest volumes of literary criticism written by women in the English language."

"Rebecca [West] is an extremely clever young woman whose critical writings in the papers have been startling everyone for the last few years. Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could, and much more savagely."

"Many books and articles about Yugoslavia have left the impression that the war was inevitable . The most famous of all English - language books on the region was Rebecca West's monumental travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941 and continuously in print since then. West’s openly pro-Serb attitudes and her view that the Muslims were racially inferior had influenced two generations of readers and policy makers."

"No single form or genre was sufficient to contain her energy, and she lived as hard as she wrote. Rebecca West went everywhere, read everything, knew everyone. As Bonnie Kime Scott says in her editor’s introduction, "To read her letters in an informed way is to receive an education in the culture of the twentieth century.""

"If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him. I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished."

"It’s extraordinary the really tragic and dreadful things there are in marriage which are funny. I’ve never known anybody to write about this. My husband would insist on going and driving a car, and he’d never been a good driver. Like all bad drivers, he thought he was the best driver in the world and he couldn’t drive at all at the end and it was terrible."

"It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it."

"I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learnt in the rest of the world that you can't now go around and put out your hand and, across seas, exercise power; but the poor Americans had not learned that and they tried to do it. The remoteness of Americans from German attack had made them feel confident. They didn't really believe that anything could reach out and kill them. Americans are quite unconscious now that we look on them as just as much beaten as we are. They're quite unconscious of that. They have always talked of Vietnam as if by getting out they were surrendering the prospect of victory, as if they were being noble by renouncing the possibility of victory. But they couldn't have had a victory. They couldn't possibly have won."

"These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved the emptiness of one of man's most reasonable expectations. No more sensible form of government could be imagined than aristocracy. If certain able stocks in the community were able to amass enough wealth to give their descendants beautiful houses to grow up in, the widest opportunities of education, complete economic security, so that they need never be influenced by mercenary considerations, and easy access to any public form of work they chose to undertake — why, then, the community had a race of perfect governors ready made. Only, as the Lauristons showed, the process worked out wholly different in practice. There came to these selected stocks a deadly, ungrateful complacence, which made them count these opportunities as their achievements, and belittle everybody else's achievements unless they were similarly confused with opportunities; and which did worse than this, by abolishing all standards from their minds except what they themselves were and did."

"One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste."

"My note to Rebecca West brought a kind of reply and an invitation to lunch. I was pleasantly surprised to find her anything but English in her manner. But for her speech I should have thought her an Oriental, she was so vivacious, eager, charming, direct. Her friendliness, the cosiness of her room, the hot tea, were grateful after a long, cold ride in the drab autumn afternoon. She had not read my writings, she frankly admitted, but she knew enough about me to add her welcome to that of the others and she would be happy to speak at the dinner. She would also arrange an evening to have her friends meet me. I was not to hesitate to call on her for anything I might need. I left my hostess with the comforting feeling that I had found a friend, an oasis in the desert London seemed to me."

"She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form."

"But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin."

"To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end."

"She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized."

"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all."

"That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors."

"The point is that nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth."

"Yugoslavia as a subject had a tendency to swallow its students whole. When Rebecca West set about explaining the country after a brief visit in 1937, she found herself drawn into research on the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, on early Christianity, the Catholic-Orthodox schism, the origins and rise of nationalism, on Fascism and Nazism, on the nature of heroism and the nature of Evil (emphatically with a capital E). She came to believe that in Yugoslavia’s urgent moral questions could be glimpsed — and perhaps grasped! — keys to understanding all mankind, all human history and God, and after four years of writing, she loosed on the world what must surely be the longest travel narrative in the history of literature, the 1,100 densely packed pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And even within that cavernous space, she succeeded only in representing the Serb viewpoint."

"The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature."

"Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse."

"Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it."

"There...is the necessity for freedom of speech and the arts. We have to scrutinize all the advances of society to judge whether they are cruel or frustrate cruelty, and for that purpose we must hear the evidence of all persons affected by their operation and of all persons qualified by experience or learning or speculative gifts to form an interesting opinion on what those operations might be. It is therefore necessary that all classes of men should be given the fullest opportunity to express themselves without constraint, not only out of admiration for an abstraction , but as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist, of whatsoever kind, should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness, and what light may be, and darkness."

"There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body ; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one."

"It would seem … that man has been shocked by the war into forgetting how to be a political animal. This suspicion is confirmed by the spread of Fascism, which is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought. There is nothing more obvious about the post-war situation than that it is novel, springs from causes which have not yet been analysed, and cannot be relieved until this analysis is complete and has been made the basis of a new social formula. Yet persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them."

"Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."

"I am for the legal government of Republican Spain against Franco, since Spain herself, at a properly conducted election, chose that Government and rejected the party which now supports Franco. I am also against Fascism; the reforms of Diocletian were a work of genius and made many people temporarily happy, but failed in the end and added greatly to human misery. I see no reason why this inferior modern copy of them should succeed."

"Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe."

"There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped."

"It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women."

"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."

"After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking."