Elizabeth Robins Pennell

“ The cow’s bell has ceased to tinkle the herd to rest; they have all paced across the heath. Is not this the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments; worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of; and reveries, mild and enchanting as the first hopes of love, or the recollection of lost enjoyment, carry the hapless wight into futurity, who, in bustling life, has vainly strove to throw off the grief which lies heavy at the heart. ”

“ Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end. ”

“ Spring is the year's playtime. Who, while trees are growing green and flowers are budding, can toil with an easy conscience? Later, mere "use and wont" accustoms the most sensitive to sunshine and green leaves and fragrant blossoms. It is easy to work in the summer. But spring, like wine, goes to the head and gladdens the heart of man, so that he is fit for no other duty than the enjoyment of this new gladness. If he be human, and not a mere machine, he must and will choose it for the season of his holiday.
This is why in the spring the midday breakfast appeals with most charm. ”

“ Had I hunted all London over, I could not have found a more complete contrast to Mrs. Maxfielde. She was Irish, with no respect for Victorian proprieties, but as disreputable looking an old charwoman as you would care to see; large and floppy in figure, elephantine in movement, her face rough and dug deep by the trenches of more than fifty winters, her hair frowzy, her dress ragged, with the bodice always open at the neck and the sleeves always rolled up above the elbows, her apron an old calico rag, and her person and her clothes profusely sprinkled with snuff. ”

“ Our window overlooked a high terrace in which marigolds and many-colored chrysanthemums were blooming, the gardens of the Piccolomini Palace full of broad-leaved fig-trees and pale olives, and the wide waste of mountain and moorland stretching from the red city walls to the high, snow-capped Apennines on the horizon. All the morning the sun shone in our windows, and every hour and even oftener we heard the church bells, and the loud, clear bugle-calls from the barracks, once a monastery, whose mass of red and gray walls rose from the near olives. ”

“ I knew no other standpoint save the Convent standpoint.
But the temptation to regret flies as quickly as it comes. I loved the life too well at the time, I love it too well in the retrospect, to have wanted then, or to want now, to do without it. It was a happy life to live, though I would not have been a school girl had I not, with the school girl's joy in the morbid, liked nothing better than to pose as the unhappiest of mortals—to be a school girl was to be misunderstood I would have vowed, had I, in my safe oasis, ever heard the expression or had the knowledge to guess at its meaning. ”

“ London, dirty, gloomy, despised by most artists, with its little shops and taverns in the fog-bound streets; the Thames, with its ugly warehouses and gaunt factories in the mist-laden night; the crinolines of the sixties; the clinging, tight draperies of the seventies, became beautiful as he saw them. He made no effort to reform Nature, only reserving his right to select the elements that were beautiful and could be brought together, as notes in music, to create harmony, putting into practice his teaching of The Ten O'Clock. He sought colour, mass, not detail. ”

“ Too often the poet sees but the tears that live in an onion; not the smiles. And yet the smiles are there, broad and genial, or subtle and tender. "Rose among roots," its very name revives memories of pleasant feasting; its fragrance is rich forecast of delights to come. Without it, there would be no gastronomic art. Banish it from the kitchen, and all pleasure of eating flies with it. Its presence lends colour and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest dainty to hopeless insipidity, and the diner to despair. ”

“ Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring and the promise of summer. ”

“ I had grown up to accept life as a pageant for me to look on at, with no part to play in it. After my initiation into work, I could never forget, in the quietest, emptiest sections of the town, not even in placid little backwaters like Clinton Street and De Lancey Place, the machinery forever crashing and grinding and roaring to produce the pageant, to weave for Philadelphia the beautiful serenity it wore like a garment. ”

“ Yet, convinced more than ever of the sincerity and tenderness of my attachment to you, the involuntary hopes which a determination to live has revived are not sufficiently strong to dissipate the cloud that despair has spread over futurity. I have looked at the sea and at my child, hardly daring to own to myself the secret wish that it might become our tomb, and that the heart, still so alive to anguish, might there be quieted by death. ”

“ The basis of the Spanish salad may be—nay, is—the same as in other lands: tomato, cucumber, lettuce, beans, potatoes. But to these is added pepper—not miserably dried and powdered, but fresh and whole, or in generous slices—and behold! a new combination is created, a new flavour evolved. And it is a flavour so strong, yet subtle withal, so aromatic and spicy, so bizarre and picturesque—dream-inspiring as the aroma of green Chartreuse, stimulating as Cognac of ripe years—that the wonder is its praises hitherto have not been more loudly sung, its delights more widely cultivated. ”

“ Rebellion sent Holman Hunt to Palestine, Rossetti to mediævalism, Burne-Jones to legend; it kept Courbet at home, for the true was the beautiful and truth was to be found in the life and the people about him. Moreover, the painter was to see these things through, not a microscope, but his eyes. No man who looks upon a broad landscape can count the blades of grass in a field, or the leaves of ivy on a wall, or the stars in the heavens; the eye can take in only the whole, enveloped in atmosphere, bathed in light, shrouded in darkness, all things keeping their places in their planes. ”

“ For my part, I am just as glad I shall not live to see the Philadelphia that is to emerge from the present chaos, since I have not the shadow of a doubt that, whatever it may be, it will be as unlike Philadelphia as I have just learned to know it again, as this new Philadelphia is unlike my old Philadelphia, the beautiful, peaceful town where roses bloomed in the sunny back-yards and people lived in dignity behind the plain red brick fronts of the long narrow streets. ”

“ Down fell the temple of despotism; but—despotism has not been buried in its ruins! Unhappy country! when will thy children cease to tear thy bosom? When will a change of opinion, producing a change of morals, render thee truly free? When will truth give life to real magnanimity, and justice place equality on a stable seat? When will thy sons trust, because they deserve to be trusted; and private virtue become the guarantee of patriotism? Ah! when will thy government become the most perfect, because thy citizens are the most virtuous? ”

“ Sometimes the books have worn so well that we cannot put them away until we have read every word to the very last again, we have not done with the memories until we have lived again through every moment of the past to which they belong. It is in this spirit that I brought my Nights of long ago to the test, and, finding that for me they stand it triumphantly and are still as vivid and vociferous and full of life as they were of old, I have not had the courage to loose my hold upon them and let them drift back once more into unfriendly silence. ”

“ Night, beautiful everywhere from Valparaiso to Venice, is never more beautiful than in London. First he painted the Thames in the grey day, but, as time went on, he painted it in the blue night. Only those who have lived by the river for years, as we have, can realise the truth as well as the beauty of the Nocturnes. He still, like Courbet, "loved things for what they were," but he chose the exquisite, the poetic. The foolishness of Nature never appealed to him. But Courbet was no more a realist than Whistler if realism means truth. ”

“ The French will give you for breakfast a bowl of Soissons, for dinner a Romaine, which long survive as tender memories; even the humble dandelion they have enlisted in the good cause. With the Italian you will fare no less well; better it may be, for, with the poetic feeling that has disappeared for ever from their art and architecture, they fill the salad bowl at times with such delicate conceits as tender young violet leaves, so that you may smell the spring in the blossoms at your throat, while you devour it in the greens set before you. ”

“ Still, though Philadelphians in summer fly to little European towns to escape the streets they deplore as arid in Philadelphia, I know of no other town as large that is as green. The notes I made in Philadelphia are full of my surprise that I should have forgotten how green and shady are its streets, how tender is this green in its first spring growth under the high luminous sky, how lovely the wistaria-draped walls in town and the dogwood in the suburbs. ”

“ You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, and the sick heart retires to die in lonely wilds, far from the abodes of man. Did the pangs you felt for insulted nobility, the anguish which rent your heart when the gorgeous robes were torn off the idol human weakness had set up, deserve to be compared with the long-drawn sigh of melancholy reflection, when misery and vice thus seem to haunt our steps, and swim on the top of every cheering prospect? Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? ”

“ Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest café, we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses, now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt the need—as we never did—of a reason for our eagerness, we might have had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. ”

“ It stimulates imagination, it awakens ambition. A thousand and one ways there be of preparing it, each better than the last. With celery, with carrots, with tomatoes, with radishes, with parsley, with cucumber, with every green thing that grows—in greatest perfection with okras, the vegetable dear to Hungarian and American, unknown to poor Britons—it combines graciously and deliciously, each combination a new ecstasy. And, moreover, it is capable of endless decoration; any woman with a grain of ingenuity can make of it a thing of beauty, to look upon which is to sharpen the dullest appetite. ”

“ This new experience was as extraordinary a revelation as my initiation into the newspaper world. I had been living, without suspecting it, next door to people who thought of nothing, talked of nothing, occupied themselves with nothing, but art: people for whom a whole army of men and women were busily employed, managing schools, running factories, keeping stores, putting up buildings—delightful people with whom I could not be two minutes without reproaching myself for not having known from the cradle that nothing in life save art ever did count, or ever could. ”

“ Society was necessary, and might have diverted me till I gained more strength; but I blush when I recollect how often I have teased you with childish complaints and the reveries of a disordered imagination. I even imagined that I intruded on you, because you never called on me though you perceived that I was not well. I have nourished a sickly kind of delicacy, which gave me as many unnecessary pangs. I acknowledge that life is but a jest, and often a frightful dream, yet catch myself every day searching for something serious, and feel real misery from the disappointment. ”

“ In some she stands with her filmy draperies floating about her or falling in long, straight folds to her feet; in others she lies upon a couch, indolent and lovely; she dances across the paper, she bends over a great bowl, she sits with her slim legs crossed and a cup of tea in her hand, she holds a fan or a flower; but whatever she may be doing or however she may rest, she is but another expression of the beauty that haunted Whistler, the beauty that was the inspiration of the Harmonies in White and the Six Projects. ”

“ The gentle little spring chicken is sweet and adorable above all its kindred poultry. It is innocent and guileless as Bellini's angels, dream-like and strange as Botticelli's. It is the very concentration of spring; as your teeth meet in its tender, yielding flesh, you think, whether you will or no, of violets and primroses, and hedgerows white with may; you feel the balmy breath of the south wind; the world is scented for you with lilac and narcissus; and, for the time being, life is a perfect poem. ”

“ The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself by. ”

“ From the car windows I had seen my old Convent at Torresdale transformed beyond recognition, many new stations with new names by the way, rows and rows of houses where I remembered fields, Philadelphia grown almost as big as London to get into, a new, strange, unbelievable sky-line to the town, the bridges multiplied across the Schuylkill—change after change where I should have liked to find everything, every house, field, tree, blade of grass even, just as I had left it. ”

“ Papers and books lay on the floor of the drawing-room, in contrast to the blue-and-white in the cases. A litter of things at times covered the sideboard in the dining-room. Everywhere you felt the cheerlessness of a house which is not lived in. When we saw Whistler in his big, shabby overcoat shuffling about the huge studio, he struck us as so old, so feeble and fragile that we could imagine no sadder or more tragic figure. It was the more tragic because he had always been such a dandy, a word he would have been the first to use in reference to himself. ”