Satirists From England

"The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past."

"Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands."

"And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere."

"The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive."

"Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she can show any thing finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast effort hundreds of black and coloured men are making to-day to live blamelessly, honourably, and patiently, getting for themselves what scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied."

"Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships."

"They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?"

"Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for the Food."

"Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine. And how will the new republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world state with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult... The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die. ... And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear. The world has a greater purpose than happiness; our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works through him to greater issues."

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn."

"Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world."

"If it is proper to ’reconstitute’ a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years end reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there."

"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!"

"How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance of a few million miles."

"And here one may note a curious comparison which can be made between this [ascidian] life-history and that of many a respectable pinnacle and gargoyle on the social fabric. Every respectable citizen of the professional classes passes through a period of activity and imagination, of "liveliness and eccentricity," of "Sturm und Drang." He shocks his aunts. Presently, however, he realizes the sober aspect of things. He becomes dull; he enters a profession; suckers appear on his head; and he studies. Finally, by virtue of these he settles down—he marries. All his wild ambitions and subtle æsthetic perceptions atrophy as needless in the presence of calm domesticity. He secretes a house, or "establishment," round himself, of inorganic and servile material. His Bohemian tail is discarded. Henceforth his life is a passive receptivity to what chance and the drift of his profession bring along; he lives an almost entirely vegetative excrescence on the side of a street, and in the tranquillity of his calling finds that colourless contentment that replaces happiness."

"A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again."

"'Tis fixed, the irrevocable doom of Jove; No force can bend me, no persuasion move."

"As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope."

"There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope."

"Of all his works he was most proud of his garden."

"He is in my opinion the most elegant, the most correct poet; and at the same time the most harmonious...that England ever gave birth to."

"In Pope, I cannot read a line, But with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six: It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, Pox take him, and his wit."

"The verses, when they were written, resemble nothing so much as spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window upon such passers-by whom the wretch had a grudge against."

"I have entered into these particulars with respect to the Essay on Man, partly with a view of illustrating the distinction already hinted at between the two different forms in which the system of optimism has been proposed, and partly to have an opportunity of directing the attention of my readers to the noblest specimen of philosophical poetry which our language affords; and which, with the exception of a very few passages, contains a valuable summary of all that human reason has been able hitherto to advance in justification of the moral government of God."

"Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope—and you can't."

"Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each other, all the qualities that constitute genius. He had Invention, by which new trains of events are formed and new scenes of imagery displayed, as in The Rape of the Lock, and by which extrinsick and adventitious embellishments and illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the Essay on Criticism; he had Imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind and enables him to convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, Windsor Forest, and the Ethick Epistles; he had Judgement, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and, by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality; and he had colours of language always before him ready to decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression, as when he accommodates his diction to the wonderful multiplicity of Homer's sentiments and descriptions."

"Pope was not content to satisfy; he desired to excel, and therefore always endeavoured to do his best: he did not court the candour, but dared the judgement of his reader, and, expecting no indulgence from others, he shewed none to himself. He examined lines and words with minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven."

"Pope was not a classic of prose; he wrote almost exclusively in a highly finished artistic verse, which may evade the romantic formulas, but is either poetry or nothing."

"The Messiah (of 1712) reached a pitch of polished, resonant rhetoric hitherto undreamed of, and was a "copy of verses" which became the model and the despair of five generations of poets."

"The Rape of the Lock (1712–14) lifted Pope at once to the first rank of living European poets. In lightness of handling, in elegance of badinage, in exquisite amenity of style—that is to say, in the very qualities which Latin Europe had hitherto, and not without justice, denied us—the little British barbarian surpassed all foreign competitors. This is the turning-point of English subserviency to French taste. Pope and his school had closely studied their Boileau, and had learned their lesson well, so well that for the future England is no longer the ape of the French, but is competent, more and more confidently as the century descends, to give examples to the polite world."

"For more than thirty years Pope was so completely the centre of poetical attention in England that he may almost be said to have comprised the poetry of his time. There is no second instance of an English poet preserving for so long a period a supremacy comparable to his. It is possible to defend the position that one or two other versemen of the age did some particular thing better than Pope, though even this requires argument; but it is quite certain that he alone excelled over a wide range of subjects."

"Who is this Pope that I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose?"

"The little gentleman ... with a most comical and unparalleled assurance, has undertaken to translate Homer from Greek, of which he does not know one word, into English, which he understands almost as little."

"A young, squab, short gentleman, whose outward form, though it should be that of downright monkey, would not differ so much from human shape as his unthinking immaterial part does from human understanding. ... As there is no creature in nature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and so impotent as a hunch-back'd toad. ... This little author may extol the ancients as much and as long as he pleases, but he has reason to thank the good gods that he was born a modern. For had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems,—the life of half a day."

"The Iliad and the Odyssey, in his hands, have no more the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them."

"This beautiful passage [The Rape of the Lock, Canto 5, lines 25-32], from the most beautiful of poets, which ought to be fastened in large print upon every lady's dressing table, the American women, of all ranks, seem to have by heart."

"I look upon a proper appreciation of Pope as a touchstone of taste."

"The most beautiful of poets."

"Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie."

"We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as the splendid high-priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable... Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose."

"What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease."

"The sick in body call for aid: the sick In mind are covetous of more disease; And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well. To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure."

"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."

"Never find fault with the absent."

"Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain. Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise! Each stamps its image as the other flies!"

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come; Knock as you please, there's nobody at home."

"Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly."

"A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left."

"A god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature."

"True politeness consists in the being easy one-self, and making every body about one as easy as we can."