Romance and Reality

"I cannot see why a taste for the country should be held so very indispensable a requisite for excellence; but really people talk of it as if it were a virtue, and as if an opposite opinion was, to say the least of it, very immoral."

"[From Edward Lorraine]: No sin in love is so great as inconstancy, because it unidealises it. The crime of sacrilege is not in the mere theft of the golden images from the high places — it is in afterwards applying them to base and common uses. Love and faith both require the ideal to make them holy."

"[From Lady Mandeville]: I always think national costumes invented for the express advantage of travellers."

"[From Lady Mandeville]: His mind divided ! Verily that is making two bites of a cherry."

"Mr. Trevyllian affected la gastronomie : he studied it as a science ; thus vanity assisted luxury — for what professor of any science but has the pride of art ? Nothing could be more eloquent than his disdain — unless it were his pity for the uncultivated palates that rejoiced in tender beefsteaks — mouths that champed at raw celery like horses at a bit — people who simply boiled their pease, and ate apples and pears, or, as he sweepingly phrased it, "other crude vegetables.""

"[From Mr Trevyllian]: Curiosity is its own suicide ; and what is love but curiosity ?"

"But pleasures are always most delightful when we look back upon, or forward to them : …"

"[From Mr Morland]: That a peculiar temperament is required for poetry, no one will deny; but what produces that temperament ? — scenery and circumstances certainly do not. I, for one, am content to leave the question with the longitude and the philosopher's stone."

"Ill news travel fast ; and Mrs. Arundel's marriage was like the sun in the child's riddle, for it went "round each house, and round each house, and looked in at every window.”"

"It is worth while to leave home, if it were only to enjoy being of so much consequence on your return."

"… whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike ; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious."

"It may be questioned whether making pleasure a duty will add either to its flavour or its longevity."

"[From Mr Trevyllian]: There are three things the wise man sedulously cultivates — his intellect, his affections, and his pleasures. Who will deny how much it brightens the intellect ? When does the mind put forth its powers ? when are the stores of memory unlocked ? when does wit 'flash from fluent lips ? ' — when but after a good dinner ? Half our friends are born of turbots and truffles."

"[From Lady Mandeville]: This is truly a man's logic, 'making the worse appear the better reason.'"

"What betraying things blushes are ! Like sealing wax in the juvenile riddle, a blush "burns to keep a secret.""

"— it makes good the observation that a bystander sees more of the game than those who are playing ; —"

"Any great change is like cold water in winter — one shrinks from the first plunge; and a lover may be excused who shivers a little at the transmigration into a husband."

"[From Mr Morland]: {of Wordsworth} —he is the most poetical of philosophers. Strange, that a man can be so great a poet, and yet deficient in what are poetry's two grand requisites, — imagination and passion."

"We differ from our ancestors in many things — in none more than in cases of sentiment. Formerly, it was your susceptible school-girl, "your novel-reading miss" — now, women only grow romantic after forty. Your young beauty calculates the chances of her Grecian nose, her fine eyes, and her exquisite complexion — your young heiress dwells on the claims of her rent-roll, or the probabilities of her funded property : it is their mothers who run away — their aunts who marry handsome young men without a shilling. Well, the prudence of youth is very like selfishness, and the romance of age very like folly."

"Strange, that one whose opinion we neither respect nor admit should yet have power to wound ! — not stranger, though, than that it should have power to please. One may live to be indifferent to everything but opinion. We may reject friendship which has often deceived us; renounce love, whose belief, once found false, leaves us atheists of the heart : we may turn from pleasures which have palled — from employments which have become wearisome ; but the opinion of our kind, whether for good or for evil, still retains its hold; that once broken, every social and moral tie is broken too — the prisoner then may go to his solitary cell — the anchorite to his hermitage — the last link with life and society is rent in twain."

"I do not think imagination an indulgence at all to be permitted in our present state of society : very well for poets and painters — it is their business, the thing of all others not to be neglected ; but in the common construction of characters and circumstances it is an illusion quite at variance with the realities on which we are to act, and among which we are to live."

"The merit we are the first to discover, almost seems as if it were our own, and that, like a newly found country, it was to bear the name of the first finder."

"An invidious epithet is always remembered and reapplied : …"

"He soon exhausted pleasure, and then reasoned upon it : he soon exhausted it, because he wanted that colouring enthusiasm which creates more than half of what it enjoys ; and he reasoned upon it, because his activity of mind, not having been employed on fancies, remained entire for realities."

"Books, works of art, the noble statue, the glorious picture, how rarely are any of these the subjects of conversation ? Few venture to speak on any topic that really interests them, for fear they should be led away by the warmth of speaking, and, by saying more than they intended, lay themselves open to the sarcasm which lies, like an Indian in ambush, ready to spring forth the moment the victim is off his guard. Take one instance among many. Beyond the general coarse and false compliment which it is held necessary to address with a popular author, and which is repaid by an affected and absurd indifference, what vein of conversation is afterwards started ? Assuredly something which interests neither : the mind of the one receives no impression — that of the other puts forth no powers. The natural face may be a thousand times more attractive, still a mask must be worn. No one has courage to be himself. We look upon others, and our eyes reflect back their images. It is the same with the mind. Even thus in society do we mirror the likeness of others. All originality being destroyed, our natural craving for variety asks some stimulant, and we are obliged to relieve the insipidity by bitters and acids. Who would dare to be eloquent in the face of a sneer ? or who express a sentiment which would instantly be turned to shame and laughter ? Ridicule is the dry-rot of society."

"Sentiment, by the by, is one of those ill-used words which, from being often misemployed, require a definition when properly applied. Sentiment is the poetry of feeling. Feeling weeps over the grave of the beloved — sentiment weeps, and plants the early flower and the green tree, to weep too."

"[From Lady Mandeville]: What ! still retaining your Utopian visions of female felicity ? To talk of our happiness ! — ours, the ill-used and oppressed ! You remind me of the ancient tyrant, who, seeing his slaves sink under the weight of their chains, said 'Do look at the indolent repose of those people !'"

"[From Mr Trevyllian]: {Example of sexual prejudice} That preference of white sauce to brown is a singular proof of female inferiority."

"[From Edward Lorraine]: We are ourselves the stumbling-blocks in the way of our happiness. Place a common individual — by common, I mean with the common share of stupidity, custom, and discontent — place him in the garden of Eden, and he would not find it out unless he were told, and when told, he would not believe it."

"[From Mr Morland]: It is very difficult to persuade people to be happy in any fashion but their own. We run after novelty in little things — we shrink from it in great. We make the yoke of circumstance a thousand times heavier, by so unwillingly accommodating ourselves to the inevitable."

"[From Lord Mandeville]: What will Lady Lauriston do without a daughter to marry ? She really must advertise for one."

"[From Mr Morland]: You all universally like the qualities in which you yourselves are deficient : the more you indulge in that not exactly deceit, which, in its best sense, belongs to your sex, the more you appreciate and distinguish that which is true in the character of man."

"We build our castles on the golden sand ; — the material is too rich to be durable."

"Women in black gowns, and drab-coloured shawls hung upon their shoulders as if they were pegs in a passage — men in coats something between a great-coat and a frock — strings of hackney-coaches which moved not — stages which drove along with an empty, rattling sound — and carts laden with huge stones, now filled Piccadilly."

"No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable."

"… : people cannot be married without a clergyman — the milliner and the jeweller are equally indispensable."

"A new acquaintance was like a new book — and, as in the case of the book, it must be confessed she often arrived very quickly at the end."

"… imagination is as useful in keeping affection alive as the eastern monarch's fairy ring was in keeping alive his conscience."

"[From Mr Morland]: … the pleasures of travelling seem to me quite ideal. I dislike having the routine of my existence disarranged — I dislike early rising — I dislike had dinners — I dread damp beds — I like new books — I like society — I respect my cook, and love my arm-chair ; so I will travel through Italy in a chapter —"

"[From Lady Mandeville]: There are two readings of content — and mine would be, monotony."

"Alas ! oblivion is our moral death, and forgetfulness is the second grave which closes over the dead."

"Great misfortunes have at least their dignity to support them ; but the many and small miseries of life, how they do gall and wear away the spirit !"

"The first great principle of our religious, moral, civil, and literary institutions, is a dinner."

"The more imaginative love is, the more superstitious it must be : the belief of omens being past — that desire of the unattainable so inherent in our nature, and which shows itself in so many shapes — now, as far as regards prophecy, it takes another form, and calls itself presentiment ; …"

"Illusions are the magic of real life, and the forfeit of future pain is paid for present pleasure."

"I cannot agree with those romantic philosophers who hold ignorance to be bliss at any time ; but ignorance, when your listener laughs at what you say, without why or wherefore, is enough to enrage a saint. By the by, considering what an irascible race they were, the reputation of the saints for patience has been very easily acquired."

"Curious, that of the past our memory retains so little of what is peculiarly its own. The book we have read, the sight we have seen, the speech we have heard, — these are the things to which it recurs, and that rise up within it. We remember but what can be put to present use. It is very extraordinary how little we recollect of hopes, fears, motives, and all the shadowy tribe of feelings ; or indeed, how little we think over the past at all. Memory is that mirror wherein a man "beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. We are reproached with forgetting others : we forget ourselves a thousand times more. We remember what we hear, see, and read, often accurately : not so with what we felt — that is faint and uncertain in its record. Memory is the least egotistical of all our faculties."

"[From Edward Lorraine]: I think that either man's or woman's character stand in a relative position to each other, like the covered statue of Isis, whose veil mortal hand hath not raised. We never see each other but through the false mediums of passion, or affection, or indifference — all three equally bad for observation."

"… : stupidity is the masculine of silliness."

"[From Lady Mandeville]: We never understand the full heinousness of a crime unless we commit it."