Cecil Torr

“ Apart from that curious look upon its face, I have never found the Sphinx at Gizeh as impressive as the Sphingeion in Bœotia,{120} the sphinx of Œdipus outside the gates of Thebes. This is merely a hill shaped like a sphinx; and there must have been another such hill at Gizeh, from which the Sphinx was formed. There is another within a walk of here; but it takes the shape only from a certain point of view—the western rock at Haytor, as one sees it on the road from Widdicombe. In a Dartmoor mist it looks stupendous, and surpasses the Sphingeion and the Sphinx. ”

“ I am only a Wahrheit man myself, and have no Dichtung in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. ”

“ If there is to be a ‘formal’ garden, it should be next the house, as the house itself is all right-angles and straight lines that harmonize with walls of yew or cypress and kerb-stones of box. Conversely, the ‘wild’ garden should be far away; and the usual notion is that ‘landscape’ gardening covers the transition from the ‘formal’ to the ‘wild.’ I have a notion of my own that landscape gardening is like sitting between two stools. No doubt, a landscape painter may improve a landscape by omitting things that spoil the view or putting them in where they look right ”

“ But gifts that help an advocate, may be a hindrance to an author. It does sometimes happen that a reviewer knows no more about a subject than he could gather from the book he is reviewing. An author collects materials till he is bewildered—“cannot see the wood for the trees”—and he makes a bulky book, putting all this material in, but doing nothing to clear the subject up. And the reviewer will praise him for his wealth of learning, and will say he has done all that is humanly possible towards the solution of a problem that really is insoluble. ”

“ The steamer had slowly hooted its way into the Piræus in the early morning; and I was driving up to Athens soon after sunrise. With the sun behind it, the Acropolis loomed up through the fog, as I came near; and this is the only time that I have seen it looking as I feel it ought to look. It seemed a vast and overwhelming mass; whereas in broad daylight it looks rather small, and quite puny, when one sees it from a distance. I have noticed that the Pyramids at Gizeh also look puny at a distance: yet the dome of St Peter’s looks its largest at fifteen or twenty miles from Rome. ”

“ If box and yew are clipped into the shape of kerb-stones and stone walls, such trees may just as well be clipped into the shape of domes and pyramids and other architectural things; but not, I think, into the shape of birds and beasts that might fly off or walk away. It is only a bad joke to make a plant look like an animal, and even good jokes pall when they take twenty years to make and go on for a century. ”

“ Who should think to find choice works of ancient Greece with a roof of what you call the Thetch. In another house I find antiquities of Egypt, in another the Oriental porcelain and the lacquer, in another I find pictures most superb. Where originals do not exist, I find reproductions of the greatest works. Surely your England is the most artistic country in the world.”—I fear that England is Artistic in another sense. ”

“ On the morning of the procession I saw the Mahmal saddled on its camel: after which the camel went out to meet the Mecca Caravan, and then marched into the city with the pilgrims, as though it had come all the way from Mecca. As a matter of fact, the Mahmal is nothing but a pair of panniers with a canopy above, such as women ride in when they make the pilgrimage, only more ornate. ”

“ Mr Torr chats to us. We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire while he turns through his grandfather’s and his father’s letters and reads us little extracts, and lets his talk wander as it will from suggestion to suggestion.... A quaint ingenuity and originality of idea plays about it all: a sly wit flashes here and there. ”

“ I was looking ahead, a century or more, and never thought that in a few years time bread would be rationed out in England and made of other things than wheat. In what we call the good old times the labourer had no wheaten bread. In a letter of 3 December 1844 my grandfather remarks that wheat was then so cheap and oats so dear that wheat was being given to horses; and he calls wheat “food for Christians,” but then corrects himself, “when I say wheat is food for Christians, I do not mean to say the labourer is not a Christian,” although the labourer had only barley bread, not wheat. ”

“ When people now-a-days go talking of the beauty of Greek Gods, they are thinking of the works of Pheidias and his successors. There is much charm in works of earlier date; but nobody can say quite honestly that the people in them are good-looking, much less that they are beautiful. Yet the nation cannot suddenly have changed its looks. ”

“ Farmers often blundered, and have been ridiculed for that; but after all they only blundered here and there and now and then. As things are, they have to blunder on a bigger scale, and may be prosecuted if they fail to blunder as prescribed.
As for the people who prescribe these blunders, it is charitable to think that they are merely fools: they may be something worse. The law assumes that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts, and might very well assume that they intended doing all they could to damage agriculture, without increasing the supply of food. ”

“ No doubt, Scripture is taught in every school; but there are many ways of teaching it. Lustleigh has a County Council school, and the Scripture teaching is regulated by a County Council syllabus. The syllabus says what things the children are to read, and what they are to learn by heart; and when people grumble at the Education Rate, I remind them that every well-taught child in Devon can say the names of the Ten Plagues of Egypt as glibly as a parrot. And then, of course, they feel that they are getting value for their money. ”

“ Personally, I am always glad of the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed.
As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford. ”

“ If buildings are burnt out or tumble down, there is no remedy but reconstruction. But people are too fond of reconstructing buildings that are still intact, and making them ‘as good as new.’ If they want to know what a building looked like when it was new, they can surely build a copy of it somewhere else, and go and look at that: instead of putting a new front on the north transept of Westminster Abbey, they might have stuck it on a building like Truro Cathedral which is completely new. ”

“ I suppose the Legislature understands the workings of the criminal mind, but I sometimes wonder whether men can be deterred from crime by dread of seven years penal servitude, if they are not deterred by dread of five. If they reckon things up at all, they probably pick out the biggest crime they can commit for any specified sentence—“may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”—and then act accordingly. ”

“ These great Laws are not always put before young minds with due simplicity: we obscure them by our jargon. All children know that if they spread a pat of butter on a slice of bread, the bigger the slice is, the thinner the butter will be. ”

“ When people have come up for their first visit to London, I have seldom found them much impressed with the big public buildings. They have seen photographs, generally taken from some favourable point of view: so they know what to expect, and the reality is not always equal to their expectation. ”

“ Looking back on my eight years of Harrow and Cambridge and judging them by results, I find that Classics have supplied me with a mass of interesting and amusing facts to think about, whereas Mathematics only taught me how to think on abstract things. Hardly any Mathematics linger in my mind. ”

“ Our present income tax supposes that the net receipts from land will be just double the rent. The owner pays the tax upon the rent, and the occupier pays the tax upon the other half, that is, his supposed profits after paying the rent. He pays no more if his real profits are more than the supposed amount, and pays less if they are less. As the occupier usually rents the land to make a living out of it, he tries to make as large a profit as he can; and large profits may mean reckless farming that impoverishes the land. ”

“ A steamboat was nicer than a diligence; and that really was the reason why people were always going up the Rhine. It was much the easiest way of getting to Switzerland and Italy. Going by the Rhine in 1855, my father notes that it was the seventeenth time that he had gone that way, either up or down the stream. That time he had his father with him, and chafed a little at the leisurely movements of the previous generation. But he never wished for anything more rapid than the steamboat on the Rhine, whereas I have found it tedious, and gone up by the train. ”

“ A formal garden may be made to look as ugly as anything in Holland when the tulips are in bloom—five hundred tulips in a bed, all at the same distance from each other, and all of the same colour and size. ”

“ Like the rest of the farmers, they are not much of politicians: they see or know but little beyond their own and parish affairs, and seldom go beyond their market towns, where they assemble and talk of the price of cattle and corn and advise each other how to cut down their little tradesmen and labourers. Government may do what it likes to oppress any other class, so as they are not meddled with.... ”

“ The part we inhabit is in good condition, the rooms are very ancient, the walls and the ceilings are fresco, the dining-room is hung with tapestry, also the best bedrooms, the staircases are of stone, ropes passed thro’ iron rings in the walls supply the place of banisters, the walls are five feet thick; it will stand the cannon of the enemy, I have no fear in this good old place. The picture gallery is very interesting to visit, of course all family portraits, at the end of that is the old theatre ”

“ We have not sun enough in England to justify the use of Classic architecture or Palladian. These styles demand the glare of Greece and Italy; and sometimes that is not enough—in bleak places, such as Phigaleia or Segesta, I have found the old Greek temples too austere without their ancient colouring. ”

“ There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name. ”

“ The queerest table d’hôte I ever saw, was at the Singe d’Or at Tournai, 26 March 1875. That was Good Friday; and it was a first-rate fish-dinner, lasting close upon three hours. There were eighty people there, mostly from the town, as there were few travellers about, and we were the only English. The citizens went steadily through the fifteen courses, and drank dozens of champagne, and then went home with a good conscience, feeling they had carried out the precepts of the Church in having a meatless day. ”

“ Young minds understand the butter. Put ‘the force of attraction’ for ‘the thickness of the butter,’ and they will understand the Law of Universal Gravitation, as discovered by Sir Isaac Newton with the assistance of an apple.
Unluckily this easy way of learning things is like all aids to memory: more easily picked up than dropped again, when it has served its purpose. A friend of mine tells me that, out of all his Latin and Greek, the things that he remembers best are silly little rhymes that he was taught at school, “Common are to either sex, Artifex and Opifex,” and other stuff like that. ”

“ If anybody says Iota Subscript, I say iota was not subscript in good Greek, but kept its dressing in the line.
We write English in the same style as Italic type, yet print it with the Roman type that represents handwriting of four hundred years ago. If we are going to copy other writing than our own, we might as well adopt the Gothic type that still survives in Germany. Gothic and Italic both look well, but nothing can be uglier than Roman. I consider it clear proof of mania in a bibliomaniac, if he buys books in Roman type for anything but common use. ”

“ Agriculture has suffered from a cause that seems equally remote—“farm-house lodgings.” People say that farms are let at so much per acre, but all farms have a house, and the house will often pay the rent; and, when the house does that, the farmer is less careful of his land. The profit is not only from the letting of the rooms, but from selling butter, eggs, fowls, etc., without the trouble and expense of going to market, and often (I am told) at more than market prices. ”

“ In very early life I felt certain that a woman here must be a witch, because she looked it. She lived in a cottage that had a great big open fireplace, and she sat there cowering over the fire on the hearth, with her walking-stick leant up across her knees. I had no doubts about her flying up the chimney on that stick, and always hoped she would while I was there.
We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” ”

“ There was a very cultivated man who was often in this neighbourhood some years ago, and he delighted in reading novels about Devon and the West, but was quite unconscious that he was in the midst of the real thing. He was so accustomed to getting his impressions out of books that he had lost the power of getting them in any other way. The children have not come to that, and never may; but they are being overdosed with books. There is a history in use at Lustleigh school that gives three chapters to the times before the Romans came: the Stone and Bronze and Iron Ages. ”

“ The classic phrase is ‘her told she.’ A pious person told me that ‘us didn’t love He, ’twas Him loved we.’ They never say ‘we are,’ but ‘us be’ or else ‘we am,’ contracted into ‘we’m.’ They say ‘I be’ as well as ‘I’m,’ but never ‘me’m’ or ‘me be,’ though invariably ‘me and Jarge be,’ or ‘me and Urn,’ or whatever the name is, and never ‘Ernest and I’ or ‘George and I.’ They say ‘to’ for ‘at’—‘her liveth to Moreton’—and formerly said ‘at’ for ‘to’—‘I be goin’ at Bovey’—but now it is the fashion to say ‘as far as’ Bovey.—A complete Grammar might be compiled. ”

“ This was a secluded place until the railway came. My grandfather writes on 23 September 1849, “I find most people like Wreyland, that is, those advancing in years: so quiet and so sheltered.” And then on 3 January 1864, “I cannot fancy that any railway improves scenery, but this will not so disturb it as one might imagine.... They fancy it is cutting up the country and letting in more people, which will destroy the scenery and the quiet of the neighbourhood; but they think more of its introducing new society than destroying the scenery.” ”