Commonplace Book

'"...The man who aims true at the ring with his lance is drunk with joy. He carries off the prize, and congratulates himself on having had the courage to compete. But he who has broken several lances with no result goes away saying: "My luck is bad; I will not try again." And he too is pleased that he has profited by experience and has had the courage to read himself a salutary lesson..."'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'"Come on," she said gently - with two melted drops sliding to the fore of the teaspoon.

The drying bubbles of the last fit stayed on the cat's whiskers and the tip of its tongue looked trapped in its own teeth. Jane's little finger could not get in.

Life in it seemed centred only in the lungs and trying, heaving, to get out.

She put away the spoon, finally, and stood up. She moved the paraffin lamp nearer the wood. She looked down and it is, in a sense, no exaggeration to say she looked down, not at the cat dying, but at herself dying - and at that instant the character of her eyes assumed for a tranced moment[,] the character of the sea.'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 17)

Commonplace Book

'The stricken scream of the jive trumpet and belated wail of the jet engine coinciding with the welfare state professing progress is a conflict which will have its consummation, John thought, because there is only one harmony, the original harmony of the body with the coarse earth and the mind with that infinity, now a Divine vacuum, the sky...'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 16)

Commonplace Book

'...Nothing can be more dismal than the stiff and regular decorations produced by machinery. The beauty of Chinese vases, and, indeed, of Chinese work in general, is attributable to that capricious air of spontaneity which the human hand alone can impart to its work. Grace, freedom, boldness, the unexpected, and even ingenuous awkwardness are, in decoration, elements of charm which we are losing day by day, as we depend more and more upon the resources of machinery and looms.'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter I)

Evan Harrington by George Meredith (1861)

This novel is both graced and encumbered by its complexity. Meredith's famous curlicued style is an intriguing mixture. It wafts and drifts around the plot and can't help but fascinate. His plotting in this one is particularly intricate also, and this is where he comes a little unstuck. There is a strong feeling that much of the toing-and-froing of the piece is simply manoeuvring. Whether this was because he wanted to communicate a complex reality (the good excuse) or whether perhaps he was wandering, trying to find a way out of his tangle he was happy with (the bad excuse) is difficult to decide, though I must admit I tend to the latter idea. This is the story of class, seen from the point of view of an individualist. The Harringtons have significant notions of grandeur; father Mel (known as The Great Mel), a tailor, who dies at the beginning, has schooled his children to think highly of themselves, and has himself hobnobbed with the nobility, slightly audaciously. His wife is tougher and more practical, with a no-nonsense dignity. Evan, their son, is well-educated and dreamy after bigger things than his inheritance of his father's tailoring business would predicate. Just back from Portugal, where he stayed with his sister Louisa, who has married well and become a countess, he reconnects with a young aristocrat he fell in love with there who has also returned. He has neglected to mention his humble background! In her country house, with his sister engineering for all she is worth, the scene is set for a comedy of matchmaking and class-deception. Under the comedy is some autobiography I think, which is oblique in its referencing of Meredith's own tailoring family. The story is also ballasted with some fine writing about love. A novel which teems with characters and situations in what seems an endless intricate web.

Commonplace Book

'"...Of course the English are very eccentric, you don't know that, Sosthene, you have never crossed the Channel, but you can take it from me that they are all half mad, a country of enormous, fair, mad atheists..."'

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part I, Chapter Five)

Commonplace Book

'"There grows the wealth of the Valhubert family."

"D'you mean that vegetable? But what is it? I was wondering."

"Vegetable indeed! Have you never been in the country in France before? How strange. These are vineyards."

"No!" said Grace. She had supposed all her life that vineyards were covered with pergolas, such as, in Surrey gardens, support Miss Dorothy Perkins, heavy with bunches of hot-house grapes, black for red wine, white for champagne. Naboth's vineyard, in the imagination of Grace, was Naboth's pergola, complete with crazy paving underfoot.'

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part I, Chapter Four)

Commonplace Book

'...you can't just pull love out, like a hair of your head.'

from The Diplomat, a piece in The Woman in the Case and other stories by Anton Chekhov

Commonplace Book

'...misery is wanton, and will pull all down to it.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLV)

The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (1898)

I'm torn by this book, as I am in general by Gallienne's style. His contradiction is built around appearing quite erudite and rich on the page and yet incurring an overwhelming feeling of thinness and insubstantiality in the memory. This novel ostensibly covers the irruption into a depressed neighbourhood of a charismatic young preacher at its local chapel, his falling in love with a sweet and humble local girl, and his being subsequently overcome romantically by a visiting reciter. He and the reciter realise that their love is of the deepest kind, but decide, through their mutual love and respect for the local girl, that their ways will part. Theophilus the preacher and Isabel the reciter embrace in the chapel before her last performance as a last goodbye, but unfortunately they are seen by the girl, Jenny. Isabel leaves, Theophilus is none the wiser, but Jenny begins to decline. Eventually she tells him what she saw. The last third of the book is concerned with death. Jenny's first, with all its implications of guilt. Then Theophilus himself starts to droop. In his last hours he calls out to his great love, Isabel. She rushes to him, and we hear for the first time of their pact of dying together, which duly comes to pass with a mutual suicide. All this is finely written, and its classical tones are heightened discursively and given Aesthetic period richness. So why does Gallienne feel so thin in retrospect? The answer is in fullness of prose, rather than rounding out of character. No wonder, then, that his reputation is far stronger as an essayist.

Commonplace Book

'Rather to his surprise, Rose took the letter. Study her eyes if you wish to gauge the potency of one strong dose of ridicule on an ingenuous young heart. She read that Mr. George Uploft had met "our friend Mr. Snip" riding, by moonlight, on the road to Beckley. That great orbed night of their deep tender love flashed luminously through her frame, storming at the base epithet by which her lover was mentioned, flooding grandly over the ignominies cast on him by the world. She met the world, as it were, in a death-grapple; she matched the living heroic youth she felt him to be, with that dead wooden image of him which it thrust before her. Her heart stood up singing like a craven who sees the tide of victory setting toward him. But this passed beneath her eyelids. When her eyes were lifted, Ferdinand could have discovered nothing in them to complain of, had his suspicions been light to raise: nor could Mrs. Shorne perceive that there was the opening for a shrewd bodkin-thrust. Rose had got a mask at last: her colour, voice, expression, were perfectly at command. She knew it to be a cowardice to wear any mask: but she had been burnt, horribly burnt: how much so you may guess from the supple dissimulation of such a bold clear-visaged girl. She conquered the sneers of the world in her soul: but her sensitive skin was yet alive to the pangs of the scorching it had been subjected to when weak, helpless, and betrayed by Evan, she stood with no philosophic parent to cry fair play for her, among the skilful torturers of Elburne House.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLIII)

Commonplace Book

'...Two sentences had been passed on Juliana: one on her heart: one on her body: "Thou art not loved"; and "Thou must die." The frail passion of her struggle against her destiny was over with her. Quiet as that quiet which Nature was taking her to, her body reposed. Calm as the solitary night-light before her open eyes, her spirit was wasting away. "If I am not loved, then let me die!" In such a sense she bowed to her fate.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLII)

Commonplace Book

'She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive as lying closer to the Mother.

At all events, old Mrs Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears. Hers had been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are sometimes revealed.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVIII)

Commonplace Book

'There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development. Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure that we have sinned.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVII)

Commonplace Book

'...Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a bourgeois who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much - but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVI)

Commonplace Book

'...Now that he was awake, and could feel his self-inflicted pain, he marvelled at his rashness and foolishness, as perhaps numerous mangled warriors have done for a time, when the battle-field was cool, and they were weak, and the uproar of their jarred nerves has beset them, lying uncherished.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XXXVI)

Commonplace Book

'When two have lost each other in a crowd, it is best that one should stand still and await the other. Perhaps it were best for him to stand still here in life. Jenny would know where to seek him then - and maybe the dead had mysterious ways of bringing news to the living. He could wait a little while and see. For a little he could live - and listen.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXII)