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'...Do not men receive even my benefits with shrinking horror and ill-suppressed disgust? And why should I interest myself in a race which accounts me a prodigy and an outcast, and which has treated me as such? No; by all the ingratitude which I have reaped, by all the wrongs which I have sustained, by my imprisonment, my stripes, my chains, I will wrestle down my feelings of rebellious humanity! I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there was an appeal, forsooth, to my feelings; as if I, towards whom none show sympathy, ought to have sympathy with any one. Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity!..'

from The Black Dwarf by Sir Walter Scott (Chapter VI)

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'I have always found the man who demolishes a religion only one degree less tiresome than the man who discovers religion for the first time.'

from The Sixth Sense by Stephen McKenna (Chapter IV)

Sanguinaires Lighthouse and other tales by Alphonse Daudet (1929)

These tales form 'Volume III' of a one-volume edition published in 1929. I have never seen the 'volumes' included published separately. These stories carry on the more traditional strain of Daudet's output - they are contes, in the sense of being short pieces, fictional or not, which have the quality of sketches; drawings from life. There are nine of them, ranging from a haunting burst of gloom in the title piece about a Corsican lighthouse, to wry comedy about human frailty in The Drummer, to little exclamatory slices of life expressed poetically like Ah! Paris, Paris! My favourite is the pastoral and dreamy Protected by Stars, about a young shepherd and his fascination for the daughter of his master, who is marooned with him on a dark stormy night. These, at least, are not syphilitic Daudet, whose more worldly and harsh elements had forefronted in a previous volume. The remaining sections in this compilation consist in part of three of Daudet's novels, only one of which is popularly known in English, that being Sapho. I look forward to it and the far lesser known Kings in Exile and A Passion of the South with interest. He doesn't as yet strike me as a writer I can be passionate about, but perhaps the novels will force a change.

The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (1897)

This is a serious change of direction. Hobbes' first four novels were short, Wildean aphorism-fests. Then she broke into more tragic territory with her fifth and sixth, still retaining something of the lighter tone. This seventh one is not only historical and serious, but running I think in the wake of Anthony Hope's phenomenally successful The Prisoner of Zenda in its Ruritanian qualities. Perhaps in the aftermath of Oscar Wilde's trial, perhaps feeling she had exhausted her Aesthetic vein, she embarks on a political tale enlivened by intrigue, Catholicism, and pan-European events and characters. The lead is taken by Robert Orange, a young gun in the Disraeli mold, who slowly realises politics is his game whilst also gaining an appreciation of the fair form and spirit of Brigit, an illegitimate archduchess of (fictional) Alberia, whose mother had been his first taste of love. Her Catholicism moves him to convert and, having just gained a seat in parliament, he heads off to Spain to help her intrigue in Don Carlos' cause! I can feel Scott in this, and Sand is surely an inspiration too, and possibly Dumas. It is the strange backwards step of it in literary terms which is the most intriguing. Not many 'decadent' period wits stepped back into augustitude and the mid-Victorian. Where will she go next?

The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (1753)

This novel is quite different to its two predecessors. While they were shambolic and variable accounts of the lives of young rakes, those rakes were often charming and likeable. This young Ferdinand is a hell-boy with no remediation. He is uniformly manipulative, selfish and unfeeling, and woe betide anyone who comes under his spell. And a spell is what it must be, as he manages to convince all and sundry of his being on their side, only to rip hell out of them on the quiet. Oddly this lively roast is not so flavoursome, because it is so unremitting. Finally in the last few chapters we leave him in gaol (not for the first time) and our attention is taken up by his ruined adopted brother and his ruined adored girl, her ruined father and some other well-had former well-wishers coming together and realising his perfidy. A few extraordinary co-incidences later we find that much of what Fathom has 'engineered' has come unstuck and that all their lives are freed of his blight. Right at the end they discover Fathom in a miserable state of destitution as the power of his ruses has finally dried up. As he lies dying, he realises the misery he has caused, repents, and engenders their forgiveness, which gifts him back his life. Perhaps Smollett had too many complaints during the original serial publication about Ferdinand's character and the bleakness of the unending catalogue of misery he causes. Whatever, the last few chapters save this from weighing too heavy.

Commonplace Book

'"...Men now have neither gods nor kings nor idols. They have sunk lower than the heathen - for the heathen has never yet bowed down in adoration before his own individuality. He chose something which at least seemed to him more powerful than himself. Prayer has recently been defined as a reference to one's higher self! But one's 'higher self' is the soul, and the soul belongs to God..."'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Book II, Chapter XXIII)